JetBrains has been gaining a lot of stock with me lately. I recently discovered that Rider is an extremely compelling replacement for VS2019 (for C# codebases), and this kind of news is going to keep them on my radar for the foreseeable future.
As another poster said, it seems like they are trying to build their own version of Microsoft Research. It is also entirely feasible JetBrains wants to build out these concepts to further enhance their core products. Detecting and executing refactor opportunities across complex, strongly-typed codebases could have some synergy with this research and tooling.
Rider is basically taking Resharper (their VS extension that has been around for years) and merging it into their own IntelliJ IDE platform. It removes the performance and integration limitations and is fantastic to use.
As another poster said, it seems like they are trying to build their own version of Microsoft Research. It is also entirely feasible JetBrains wants to build out these concepts to further enhance their core products. Detecting and executing refactor opportunities across complex, strongly-typed codebases could have some synergy with this research and tooling.