Comment by jandrewrogers

Several things can be true simultaneously:

The process and standards of peer-reviewed publication are tedious. If the objective is efficient communication of knowledge, this is not the process that maximizes that outcome. This process is about credentials and imprimatur, not communication.

Academic publication is largely chasing prestige. The value of prestige accrues more to the individual than the company employing the individual. Incentives for companies reflect this.

Many blogified publications are unqualified slop. This sounds like an indictment but a lot of academic peer-reviewed research is also low-quality slop. In many domains, slop is rewarded, devaluing the contributions of people publishing more serious research, which affects incentives. The signal-to-noise ratio has been poor for decades no matter where you get your knowledge.

Any good research you publish will be exploited against you in myriad ways. It is effectively impossible to assert any IP rights. Research turns into a pure cost center if you treat it this way. Companies recognize this and have adapted to reflect it. In some computer science domains the state-of-the-art has been buried in trade secrets for decades such that the academic literature is embarrassingly obsolete.

Publication costs time and money. Given all of the above, why would you invest productive capacity in public communication of research results? The researchers want to work on interesting problems, the companies want to maximize the leverage from their research. Publishing delivers neither.

A lot of fundamental research is done for the purpose of solving a problem, not publishing a paper. Their motivation and personal reward is solving the problem, not publishing it. Once they've solved it, it is no longer interesting and they are on to the next interesting problem.

Some research is coupled with national security considerations. If you do frontier research this is always sitting in the background.

All of this is a consequence of incentives. A large percentage of all basic research no longer happens in academia. I've greatly enjoyed participating in non-publishing research programs. I also understand why they don't publish. I've done a significant amount of interesting foundational research under my own auspices where it was not worth the effort to publish. I'm not chasing prestige, I had a problem I needed to solve.

No one should be surprised by any of this.