16 July 2025 · 2 min
“All innovation comes from industry is just wrong, universities invented many useful things.”
But that’s not the argument. Nobody thinks that Knuth contributed nothing to software programming.
Rather the point is that the direction of the arrow is almost entirely wrong. It is not
academia → industry → consumers
This is almost entirely wrong. I am not saying that the arrows do not exist… but it is a complex network where academia is mostly on the receiving end. Academia adapts to changes in society. It is rarely the initiator as far as technological innovation goes.
But let me clarify that academia does, sometimes, initiate innovation. It happens. But, more often, innovation actually starts with consumers (not even industry).
Take the mobile revolution. It was consumers who took their iPhone to work and installed an email client on it. And they changed the nature of work, creating all sorts of new businesses around mobile computing.
You can build some kind of story to pretend that the iPhone was invented by a professor… but it wasn’t.
Also, it wasn’t invented by Steve Jobs. Not really. Jobs paid close attention to consumers and what they were doing, and he adapted the iPhone. A virtuous circle arose.
So innovation works more like this…
academia ← industry ← consumers
If we are getting progress in AI right now, it is because consumers are adopting ChatGPT, Claude and Grok. And the way people are using these tools is pushing industry to adapt.
Academia is almost nowhere to be seen. It will come last. In the coming years, you will see new courses about how to build systems based on large language models. This will be everywhere after everyone in industry has adopted it.
And we all know this. You don’t see software engineers going back to campus to learn about how to develop software systems in this new era.
Look, they are still teaching UML on campus. And the only way it might die is that it is getting difficult to find a working copy of Rational Rose.
In any case, the fact that innovation is often driven by consumers explain largely why free market economies like the United States are where innovation comes from. You can have the best universities in the world, and the most subsidized industry you can imagine… without consumers, you won’t innovate.
Daniel Lemire, "Innovation starts with consumers, not academia," in Daniel Lemire's blog, July 16, 2025, https://lemire.me/blog/2025/07/16/innovation/.
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I suspect the
Academia, Industry, Consumer
graph is the complete directed graph no 3 vertices-complex
interactions between the three in all directions.
Yes, I follow you on this.
Precisely, in the LLM-ChatGPT case, it was not at all consumers → industry → academia. More like (academia—industry) → consumers. The spark was an innovative & improved “productification” of what was in academia labs for months, then released to consumers, who massively adopted that. _Then_, after the initial spark, one may argue that the “rest” of the wave was consumer-driven (so, it may depend when we say that innovation started).
And even if I am also in CS, I’d say that innovation in other fields (e.g., physics or biotech) often follows a similar “(academia—industry) → consumers” pattern: academia find/create new materials/new property of matter/living cells, industry productifies, consumers adopt.
The spark was an innovative & improved “productification” of what was in academia labs for months
Arguably, the main conceptual ‘spark’ was the invention of Transformers which made it possible to scale the computation needed for LLMs. This happened at Google. Bert was also instrumental as a foundation, and this was at Google also.
LLMs did not brew in academia for months. In fact, leading academics like Hinton were not only absent, but, speaking for Hinton, he was completely taken by surprise by his own admission.
I’m not sure if it has ever been thus, but at least in the last generation the idea that academic scholars in STEM fields spend a significant chunk of their effort on “innovation” is a misunderstanding. Most academics most of the time need to focus on making and maintaining their reputation in a small scholarly community. They do this by publishing research that is a modest refinement of some well-established work in that community.
It’s easy to see this as a sad waste of time, and sometimes it is. At its best this is useful work because it solidifies the foundations that both scholar and innovators can build on.
Probably most academics hope of some day having the time and freedom to do more broadly relevant work. But a large majority never do.
The other player is government. Historically a lot of technological innovation has come out of the military (e.g. early computers for computing ballistic trajectories and code breaking). This may be in partnership with academia and industry (e.g. the ENIAC was developed at the University of Pennsylvania with Army funding), however the source of funding and impetus for innovation is the military because they are the “consumer.”
I don’t believe it.
There is a consumer who likes chatbots but I hear so much complaining about Microsoft stuffing Copilot into everything and I haven’t heard a single good thing about the hallucinated trash results that Google forces on us without our consent. To many consumers, LLMs are another form of harassment right up there with NFTs.
As I see it, there was a lot of work in academia on modelling sequences with Markov Chains, Conditional Random Fields and such for decades as well as a few attempts at modelling sequences with neural networks going back as far as the 1980s.
There were Geoff Hinton’s breakthroughs in the mid-2000’s and in the 2010’s I was involved in three commercial projects involving neural networks for text. So it really was academia > industry > consumers.