Universities are also not suited to test which race car is the fastest, but that does not obviate the need for academic research in mechanical engineering.

There are a million other research things to do besides running huge pretraining runs and hyperparam grid search on giant clusters. To see what, you can start with checking out the best paper and similar awards at neurips, cvpr, iccv, iclr, icml etc.

This issue of accessibility is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, but it doesn’t mean that only large companies are doing good research.

Personally I think this resource mismatch can help drive creative choice of research problems that don’t require massive resources. To misquote Feynman, there’s plenty of room at the bottom