[aleph_minus_one]

> It's a race over resources, as a (former) researcher on a low-budget university, we just cannot compete. We are coerced to believe whatever figure is passed on in the literature as "benchmark", without possibility of replication.

The central purpose of university research has basically always been that researchers work on hard, foundational topics that are more long-term so that industry is hardly willing to do them. On the other hand, these topics are very important, that is why the respective country is willing to finance this foundational research.

Thus, if you are at a university, once your research topic becomes an arms race with industry, you simply work either at the wrong place (university instead of industry) or on a "wrong" topic in the respective research area (look for some much more long-term, experimental topics that, if you are right, might change the whole research area in, say, 15 years, instead of some high resource-intensive, minor improvements to existing models).