Comment by godelski
Just last week I said something inline with that[0]. Many people conflated my claim that Meta has a lot of good people with "Meta /is/ winning the AI race". I just claimed they had some of who I think are some of the best researchers in the field, but do not give them nearly the same resources or capacity to further their research that they give to these "rock stars". Tbh, the same is true for any top lab, I just think this happens more at Meta because Meta is so metric and rock star focused.
So I agree. The vision is misguided. I think they'd have done better had they taken that same money and just thrown it at the people they already have but who are working in different research areas. Everyone is trying to win my doing the same things. That's not a smart strategy. You got all that money, you gotta take risks. It's all the money dumped into research that got us to this point in the first place.
It's good to shift funds around and focus on what is working now, but you also have to have a pipeline of people working on what will work tomorrow, next year, 5 years, and 10 years. The people are there that can do that work. The people are there that want to do the work. The only thing is there's little to no people that want to fund that work. Unfortunately it takes time to bake a cake.
Quite frankly, these companies also have more than enough money to do both. They have enough money to throw cash hand over fist at every wild and crazy idea. But they get caught in the hype, which is no different than an over focus on the attribution rather than the process or pipeline that got us the science in the first place.