The death of corporate research labs

You're partially right if the argument is "basic research" = less applied fields / "purer" math, but even there Microsoft research has been a significant player in the TCS and optimization community.

A lot of the current research done at universities is also funded by these organizations, either via grants (monetary or equipment like from Nvidia) to research labs, or scholarships and financial support to students. A large part of AI advancement in the past few years have been precisely because of the amount of effort these firms have put in (along with a lot of others, they are just the most public).

The challenge I'm talking about is papers, specifically the game of publishing. I feel like PhD students spend more time in optimizing for publications than doing actual research. There's an obsession with the number of papers so everyone is trying to eek out a paper for every semi-failed experiment, overfitted model, or unfinished prototype. No one wants to throw away effort on something that basically failed, so they're trying to find the perfect narrative, frame their results just so it looks like they're good, or slice and combine it into something submittable. Every deadline is worth submitting to, the number of selective conferences is growing, and there's incentive to "get on" another paper as a co-author (which means building collaborations, helping out, editing).

For each paper, there's months spent writing, giving and receiving feedback, making figures and formatting. Each submission usually requires some change to the format and language, so upon rejection, the paper is edited and targeted towards the next conference. Then there's the submission game of proposing reviewers, choosing the right track or subcommittee, interpreting reviews, writing multi-page rebuttals, editing and getting feedback from co-authors about the rebuttals, and in the best case a month later, preparing the camera-ready version, the back-and-forth with the publisher, and finally preparing and practicing the conference presentation.

So before great research can truly come out of universities, I think publications need to be deemphasized. This could be a simple norm like judging researchers on their best 3 papers for faculty hiring and research awards. In turn, that would reduce paper submissions, increase paper acceptance rates, and finally -- leave more time for actual research at universities.

When you don't have a monopoly, the investor mindset is that the company should be laser-focused on "core competencies" (buzzword, but important) and return excess capital to shareholders - who then provide it to other companies that will innovate in the field. Keep in mind, the universe of alternative investments go beyond the stock market/PE/VC.

Capital is tied to shareholder value. When you can't point to something creating value, there isn't a reason for capital to stay. For a company to maintain a research lab, it needs to be perceived as something other than a cost center. In contrast, Bell was able to entertain its own full-fledged R&D labs because shareholders expected them to create new avenues of profit themselves because they were the monopoly.