I, Google: Estimating the Impact of Corporate Involvement on AI Research 

Abstract

While corporate involvement in modern scientific research is an indisputable fact, the impact of corporate involvement on scientific quality is controversial. While corporate interests can constrain research agendas, directing focus toward applied, commercially relevant questions, firms also provide resources-funding, data, engineering talent, and technical challenges-that can catalyze breakthroughs. This paper empirically assesses the impact of corporate involvement on scientific research by focusing on dual-affiliated artificial intelligence researchers located at the intersection of academia and industry. After controlling for the researcher's quality and topic preferences, I find that corporate involvement leads to up to a +44% increase in field-weighted citations received by a paper. I document evidence that this effect arises because the average benefit of a firm's scientific resources exceeds the cost of that firm's scientific constraints. Specifically, I find that corporate involvement raises the likelihood of producing breakthrough work, with these effects amplified when firms have greater resources. However, corporate involvement also alters the direction of the dual-affiliate author's research to align more with the firm's commercial interests. This paper is one of the first large-scale studies in any scientific field to estimate a positive impact of corporate involvement on science or to detail the mechanism driving this impact.

Keywords: innovation, scientific productivity, university-firm relationship