[D] Has industry effectively killed off academic machine learning research in 2026?

This wasn't always the case, but now almost any research topic in machine learning that you can imagine is now being done MUCH BETTER in industry due to a glut of compute and endless international talents. The only ones left in academia seems to be: niche research that delves very deeply into how some older models work (e.g., GAN, spiking NN), knowing full-well they will never see the light of day in actual applications, because those very applications are being done better by whatever industry is throwing billions at.