[atorodius]

As someone who did a PhD ending 4y ago and joined a industry research lab, I can relate to this a lot, I think this is very much spot on

> a lot of these PhD’s hired back then were therefore asked to and free to do research; that is, they chose what they want to work on and they publish what they want to publish. it was just like an academic research position however with 2-5x better compensation as well as external visibility and without teaching duties,

exactly!

> such process standardization is however antithetical to scientific research. we do not need a constant and frequent stream of creative and disruptive innovations but incremental and stable improvements based on standardized processes.

A lot of the early wave AI folks struggle with this. They wanna keep pushing wild research ideas but the industry needs slow incremental stuff, focused on serving