Stanford professor pushes back: industry has no incentive to train scientists from scratch
anshulkundaje · x · 2026-10-21
Stanford professor Anshul Kundaje engaged in a heated debate over academia vs. industry in the AI era. His core points:
- Open-ended bluesky research simply cannot happen in industry—there is no incentive structure for it; that's what academia exists for.
- Industry has neither the bandwidth nor the incentive to train scientists from scratch. Academia's role is bringing people to independent productivity, after which they can work anywhere.
His interlocutor countered that engineers at Musk's companies only became productive after leaving academia, and that Nobel Prizes (Hassabis, Jumper) are already migrating out of academia. The exchange captures a real industry anxiety about research training.
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