I agree with you. However very few "ML engineers" do any novel work, let alone "truly novel" work. Typically they just take the existing code and apply it to their specific problems with some tweaking. Sometimes they would try to reproduce papers when no code is available. Very few engineers are capable of the NeurIPS quality research - it does not matter if it get published or stays in a private repo. That's much harder to do and to teach than what 90% of typical ML engineers do. That was my point.
There's also a ton of bad research being published in second rate conferences, but I don't consider that "research". You won't get "simple extensions of what has been done before" published in a top level conference, the acceptance rates have been extremely low recently.
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I agree with you. However very few "ML engineers" do any novel work, let alone "truly novel" work. Typically they just take the existing code and apply it to their specific problems with some tweaking. Sometimes they would try to reproduce papers when no code is available. Very few engineers are capable of the NeurIPS quality research - it does not matter if it get published or stays in a private repo. That's much harder to do and to teach than what 90% of typical ML engineers do. That was my point.
There's also a ton of bad research being published in second rate conferences, but I don't consider that "research". You won't get "simple extensions of what has been done before" published in a top level conference, the acceptance rates have been extremely low recently.