[madhadron]

That's the point, but the reality of job, training, and funding structures today is that almost no one in academia can do anything that is not an incremental step on the research who has already managed to become politically established.

[jackpirate]

Right, but that's pretty much true of industry as well. I just don't see any examples of major scientific breakthroughs coming from industry that aren't equally coming from universities.

[mturmon]

But, returning to the particular case of the OP:

His essay seemed to say that the cautious incrementalism and turf-buildout that succeeds well with NSF (where most of the funding for academic ML research comes from), turned out to be less exciting than riding upon the Google juggernaut.

It's hard to argue with that. The applicability of ML technology has attracted companies with deep pockets, and really changed the landscape of research.