Have you heard of the MIT AI lab and Symbolics? During AI spring it generally would switch to situations like these. We don’t pay a good enough wage to researchers so they get out of academia .
Don't forget the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s. For three or four years it seemed anyone in academia who even just knew HTML was jumping ship to a dot-com and their insane salaries. A few years later many of them came crawling back to their old institutions, desperate to get a job.
