That's not exactly how it works. For example, Go, the board game, is not particularly relevant to Google, owner of DeepMind. Yet they spent considerable resources in creating and training a succession of systems that excel at it. Besides some applications, big technology companies see AI partly as a future investment, partly as very good publicity. My guess in any case.
Then again there are the general problems that are relevant to everyone, like natural language understanding, question answering, image recognition and so on, high-level tasks for which solutions have broad applicability. Rather tautologically, such tasks are always relevant to anyone who can perform them well.
In any case, if this was not the case there wouldn't be any motivation for academic teams to find ways to train with smaller computing resources, as the article reports.
Then again there are the general problems that are relevant to everyone, like natural language understanding, question answering, image recognition and so on, high-level tasks for which solutions have broad applicability. Rather tautologically, such tasks are always relevant to anyone who can perform them well.
In any case, if this was not the case there wouldn't be any motivation for academic teams to find ways to train with smaller computing resources, as the article reports.