[jcattle]

You are aware where neural nets originated? Who came up with the concept of backpropagation to train them?

Sure, nowadays this whole field is pushed forward by industry. But I would argue that for most technological advancements the foundations are laid in traditional academia.

Of course if you are not in academia you will only ever get in touch with the things which work out and get picked up by industry, completing the impression that only industry is doing valuable stuff. Insert suvivorship bias meme here

[ctoa]

The earliest neural network work on perceptrons was done in an applied contract lab for the US Navy, it was not done in an academic setting.

Backpropagation has been reinvented multiple times, because it is a basic application of the chain rule. The earliest recognizable usage of it is in control theory at NASA during the Apollo program.

It's a mistake to be dismissive of academic work which has been very important, but it's equally a mistake to think that academia is the sole source of foundational work.