You seriously think that university research in the US is largely funded or driven by companies? This is utterly wrong.
*Edit*. The question is why the united states has the "best research universities". That is a very general-level question and the Parent made a very general, and very wrong, claim in response. Regardless of whether some specific fields might have more industrial funding than others, it's easy to google the overall portion: and industry funding is quite minor.
> Unless you’re talking about AI/ML, then yes, university labs receive more from companies, than government funding agencies.
This is simply untrue. Companies comprise less than 10% of overall university research funding, and AI/ML is far from dominant. It's easy to verify this.
While I would tend to agree that private funding for research is way better in the US, Bell Labs is not necessarily a good example.
True, the tech. output of the outfit was amazing, but they had massive govt support (among other things, they were given an official monopoly by the USG).
It wasn't just the monopoly itself but their revenue and profit structure was driven by the research (cap ex and op ex were treated differently by the consent decree, and they had performance metrics to meet as demand grew). Research also had valuable P.R. value.