Google and Facebook, and other corporate research labs are focused on AI for profit, not on advancing science..such laboratories aren’t advancing the field of cognitive science anymore than Ford is advancing the field of physics at the edge.
After all, no matter how impressive neural networks are, they operate on principles that date back decades. Perhaps the greatest good for humanity isn’t in fine-tuning algorithms that make people pay attention to Facebook at the expense of their mental health.
Source: Academic expert says Google and Facebook’s AI researchers aren’t doing science
I tend to agree with the main point that the work being done at Google and Facebook doesn’t count as science, in the sense that it’s not advancing our understanding of the world. The engineers at software companies spend a lot of time optimising algorithms until they get the answer they need. I’m not 100% sure but it sounds a bit like p-hacking.
Having said that I also think that there’s a difference between the kind of academic research that enhances our understanding of the world, and the kind of applied research that has commercial value. I’d also love to see more work devoted to cancer diagnosis (and therapeutic intervention development) than social media optimisation, but that’s not really the point. This is about choosing to make an intellectual contribution to a field of research (in which case, do a PhD at a university) or applying well-understood theoretical principles in the service of real world application (in which, case go work for a startup).