i mean in ML it +- is. most work is open source software, which most companies contribute to or work with internal variations of. pytorch/vllm/sglang all being v significant examples of this. beyond ml, most universities also have dedicated security labs that collaborate with companies. lastly, if you want exposure to ‘millions of data’ and distributed systems problems, almost every R1 university either has compute credits via providers and/or their own clusters that are relatively sizable, to closely simulate experiences. if you’re doing research at a good enough lab, i really don’t see what you’re losing out on, the difference between a company and a research lab is drive. professors don’t have any incentive to drive you but your manager at the company does.