| Acquisitions, like for DeepMind is usually a way to hire talent. It can make sense when the technology is new and getting a few year of lead time on what is going to be a growing market may make some financial sense. In this specific xLSTM case, the industry has matured, they are just one among many (Mamba, S3Ms, transformers-variants... ), they have already been sitting on it for at least 6 months, I don't see what their play is. An other case study that's probably interesting, are the authors of the Adam Paper, https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6980 , (Awarded "2020: The Adam optimization paper is the world's #1 most cited scientific paper of the past five years"). Probably a few (10?,100?) billions worth value created. You can find the authors bios http://dpkingma.com/ https://jimmylba.github.io/ I think there is a huge problem with the capture and sharing of value in the whole deep-learning industry. Academia's naivety plays a role in it, Generational Shift technologies are badly rewarded. Incremental Shift technologies aren't rewarded at all. Powerful technologies into many hands with low rewards for their creators while the value they generate keeps going to the same pockets. That's a recipe for disaster. Will be a fun thing to come back in a few years to see how it had unfold. |