Are you asking how academics make money from giving away knowledge in papers? It's complicated
The authors are positioning themselves as a company and not merely academics :
A Sepp Hochreiter's video from 6 months ago hyping xLSTM :
https://youtu.be/hwIt7ezy6t8?feature=shared&t=561 in which he state his intent to raise €300M to make a european alternative to openai's GPT for niche domains thanks to this new method that will allow to train for cheaper and better.
He recently received (2023) € 35,000 in prize money at the 5th annual German AI Award.
https://www.jku.at/en/festival-university/media/detail/news/...
Or is it just an academic tactic to get more funding ? To extract more work from PhD students by making them think they are going to strike it big ?
How are they intending to build a moat if they publish their papers ? Will this technology be encumbered by patents/license ?
In this specific xLSTM case, the industry has matured, they are just one among many (Mamba, S3Ms, transformers-variants... ), they have already been sitting on it for at least 6 months, I don't see what their play is.
An other case study that's probably interesting, are the authors of the Adam Paper, https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6980 , (Awarded "2020: The Adam optimization paper is the world's #1 most cited scientific paper of the past five years"). Probably a few (10?,100?) billions worth value created. You can find the authors bios http://dpkingma.com/ https://jimmylba.github.io/
I think there is a huge problem with the capture and sharing of value in the whole deep-learning industry. Academia's naivety plays a role in it, Generational Shift technologies are badly rewarded. Incremental Shift technologies aren't rewarded at all.
Powerful technologies into many hands with low rewards for their creators while the value they generate keeps going to the same pockets. That's a recipe for disaster.
Will be a fun thing to come back in a few years to see how it had unfold.