[jcranmer]

I wouldn't go so far as a sibling commenter and so that most academic research is irreproducible bullshit. But academic research does tend to be chewing-gum-and-baling-wire products that are meant to hold together just long enough to get the necessary results. The rate-limiting step of turning academic research into useful products is "let's flip through all the academic research to find interesting papers," it's "figure out how to make this very-barely-works academic product usable on anything other than the exact things they did for the results section."

And, to be blunt, I have never seen anyone pitch an AI project to do that. AI pitches, even today, are almost invariably solving problems that are already decently solved (search is essentially a solved problem). And most of their proponents have shown no willingness to the practitioners telling them what the actual problems they need better solutions for.