Agreed. I used to be an industrial researcher at one of the last companies that didn’t require their researchers to think of short-term productization goals. However, things changed at my former company, and I ended up leaving for a tenure-track position at a community college.

I don’t know what industrial research in CS is like in the era of agentic coding. On one hand I suppose building prototypes is faster than ever, but on the other hand I genuinely don’t know how well LLMs do with harder programming tasks. It’s one thing to have an agent work on a CRUD app, but I wonder how effective agents are at handling things like parallelism, distributed computing, load-balancing, and other topics that are harder to write than the average CRUD app. I am also aware of efforts such as Sakana AI’s automated scientific discovery research, and I wonder if many of the incremental, short-term research topics many companies pursue can be automated.

I’m a bit pessimistic about the state of research these days, from funding to publish-or-perish to the effects of generative AI (automation, AI slop publications, AI slop reviews). Then again, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, and maybe things are better than I think.