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points by dragonwriter 9 hours ago | 0 comments
Its not a bad thing, but exploratory research as opposed to reaearch that finetunes along a path already paved by exploratory research is something that doesn’t usually happen much in for-profit product-oriented firms when there is such a path available; it happens in academia and corporate labs pick it up once it reaches the point where the basics show commercial promise. CS is a little bit of an exception because the capital cost of basic research isn’t, proportionally, as high, and because the promise-to-product path is often short enough that having done the basic work in house can be a meaningful advantage in getting to market first (though, see Google on much of modern AI for a counterexample).

But even in computing, when there is a promising way forward that the basic reaearch has been done on, its hard to justify side quests.

[–] bigfatkitten 9 hours ago
Those exploratory "side quests" in industry are how we got the transistor, the liquid crystal display, Shannon's information theory, the laser and practical photovoltaic cells, among many other foundational technologies upon which we rely today.
[–] publlus_enigma 5 hours ago
Blue LEDs too, which have transformed lighting and displays.
[–] catlifeonmars 5 hours ago
Laser printers were a side project that almost got the inventor fired.
[–] bitwize 4 hours ago
And then they made back 200x the operating expenses of the lab (Xerox PARC) they came from over its entire lifetime.
[–] WalterBright 8 hours ago
Jet engines, too.
[–] RetroTechie 8 hours ago
> and corporate labs pick it up once it reaches the point where the basics show commercial promise.

How does that work when the research team moved elsewhere? Re-hire talent? That takes time - the 1 thing you don't have in a fast-moving field like AI. Post sums it up nicely:

"Do the math—how much is it worth to halve training and inference cost given that the industry has investments approaching a trillion dollars?"

How much is these researchers' salaries, compared to what MSFT spends on compute? Chances are it's peanuts in comparison.

[–] lovich 5 hours ago
Yes but you forget that spending on compute is spending on machines that the company owns while spending on researchers is spending on other apes that trigger the social hierarchies of executives brains and who have the dreaded key word of “rights”

Companies will try to ruthlessly rid themselves of labor as long as those members of labor have agency and rights.

If someone disagrees they can convince me by explaining why a company wouldn’t choose to spend X on a machine they wholly own vs X on an employee they don’t.

There’s some room for argument that employees can do more than machines can but in the current AI zeitgeist arguing that we have machines with equivalent to human intelligence I don’t see how you wouldn’t see this coming if you believed the zeitgeist.

[–] pyrale 9 hours ago
> CS is a little bit of an exception because the capital cost of basic research isn’t, proportionally, as high, and because the promise-to-product path is often short enough that having done the basic work in house can be a meaningful advantage in getting to market first (though, see Google on much of modern AI for a counterexample)

...And because they have monopoly money. Basically, research labs are usually vanity spending for corporations with too much money. Xerox parc was funded by a monopoly. Bell labs was funded by a monopoly. Google funds its moonshots with its monopoly.

[–] robotresearcher 7 hours ago
Bell and Xerox became powerful because they invented game-changing technologies. They were fundamentally research-based organizations from the start.
[–] vlovich123 7 hours ago
Remind me again where the transformer comes from?
[–] eli_gottlieb 5 hours ago
> it happens in academia and corporate labs pick it up once it reaches the point where the basics show commercial promise.

Ah, well, good thing we've almost entirely defunded academic science.