  Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen tremendous development in industry and
academia. However, striking recent advances by industry have stunned the world,
inviting a fresh perspective on the role of academic research in this field.
Here, we characterize the impact and type of AI produced by both environments
over the last 25 years and establish several patterns. We find that articles
published by teams consisting exclusively of industry researchers tend to get
greater attention, with a higher chance of being highly cited and
citation-disruptive, and several times more likely to produce state-of-the-art
models. In contrast, we find that exclusively academic teams publish the bulk
of AI research and tend to produce higher novelty work, with single papers
having several times higher likelihood of being unconventional and atypical.
The respective impact-novelty advantages of industry and academia are robust to
controls for subfield, team size, seniority, and prestige. We find that
academic-industry collaborations struggle to replicate the novelty of academic
teams and tend to look similar to industry teams. Together, our findings
identify the unique and nearly irreplaceable contributions that both academia
and industry make toward the healthy progress of AI.
