[bartwr]

It wasn't an exaggeration! :) The shock of many of my colleagues (often not even junior... sometimes professors who decided to join the industry) "wait, I need to talk to product teams and ask them about their needs, requirements, trade-offs, and performance budgets and cannot just show them my 'amazing' new toy experiment I wrote a paper about that costs 1000x their whole budget and works 50% of time, and they won't jump to putting it into production?" was real. :) They don't want to think about products and talk to product teams (but get evaluated based on research that gets into products and makes a difference there), just do Ivory tower own research.

One of many reasons why Google invented Transformers and many components of GPT pre-trainint, but ChatGPT caught them "by surprise" many years later.