My understanding is that frontier researchers will work for companies that will let them publish papers and discuss them with their peers.
When you're an engineer at the tier of these AI researchers, winning an extra 100k/year on top of you current 500k (numbers out of my ass) is not worth it vs getting name recognition. Being known as one of the authors that made the transformer for example will enable you work with other bright minded individuals and create even better things.
So essentially these commercial companies have "we'll let you publish papers when you work for us" as a perk.
> When you're an engineer at the tier of these AI researchers, winning an extra 100k/year on top of you current 500k (numbers out of my ass) is not worth it vs getting name recognition. Being known as one of the authors that made the transformer for example will enable you work with other bright minded individuals and create even better things.
Also, instead of an extra 100k a year, you get to raise a billion dollars in VC funds for your next company
& then sell it back to Google, in this case https://www.axios.com/2024/08/05/google-characterai-venture-...