161–170 of 256 posts
EDIT: I'm looking for a reference for this. I saw an article that says it was funded with 1% of company wide revenues. This is undoubtedly true, but a graduate student I know that knows about such things says that a substantial fraction or maybe even all of it was reimbursed.
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Really interesting point regarding the many year unprofitable VC backed companies being almost a replacement form of corporate lab. Though most of those aren't pursuing "hard technology" equivalents to inventing transistors or the like. Well perhaps Quantum Computers at Google, but they don't seem to be pursuing that correctly. What are your thoughts on hard technology like that?
I think that moves the goal posts a bit. UNIX was one of the most significant products to come out of Bell, and that's still used today. My laptop, my playstation and all of the production servers I'm responsible for use software based on innovations, based on innovations, based on innovations... of UNIX. For things like microprocessor, display, storage, network, camera, microphone... hardware, all of that is still a…
Wasn't MSFT the biggest $$ donor, and RedHat the one with more devs commiting?
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> It's difficult for academic labs to keep up, actually. That's probably more an intrinsic problem with academia (lower wages, limited career opportunities, limited resources compared to companies).
There is a spectrum of the kinds of research one might do. My advisor always used to remind me that if a team of good engineers at a big corporation can do something, it's not a good research problem to tackle for a grad student in a uni lab. So we naturally tended to more speculative/fundamental problems, which seems like a good thing - instead of trying to compete with industry labs we augment them.
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In the enlightenment you could make discoveries about lightning with a kite and a key, in your free time when you weren't working as a publisher or founding America. In 2020 you need 10,000 scientists and $9bn to build a hadron collider, and 99.9% of people won't even understand if your result is important or not. Are we less good at science now, given that we're spending far more resources for far less impact? Or ra…
The big problems in science can be solved by much smaller teams. LHC is just proving out the dominant paradigm. It’s not gonna help us understand dark matter and _that’s_ the real anomaly in the current physical understanding of the world. Crack that an you’re the next Einstein/newton or at least Planck/schrodinger/hooke. There’s plenty of room for innovation in green energy tech, housing materials, ag science, etc..…
In case anyone wants a quick link to the LHC dark matter program, check the ATLAS [1] and CMS [2] summaries.
TL;DR: The LHC has ruled out a good chunk of a few popular dark matter variants already. There are a lot more searches in the pipeline. They haven't found anything yet, but of course nature doesn't just drop particles in the first place you look.
There are also some crazier plans in the works [3] which use the existing beams to look in other places.
[1]: https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/CombinedSumma...
[2]: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMSPublic/SummaryPlotsE...
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You mention Siri as an example of Apple taking credit. Siri was on the App Store before Apple bought it and they kept the name. But honestly, who cares but geeks about what the general population thinks about who invented it?
I worked at SRI, though not on Siri. (Wish I had; they got a nice payday when it was bought.) Siri was weaker before Apple bought it, because there was only so much they could do with the public APIs. Apple buying it was the best outcome. It allowed Siri to come into its full potential, while at the same time inspiring others to make their own.
Why aren't there blue sky research labs funded by curious billionaires? Xerox PARC's key computing inventions cost a total of US$48 million in today's dollars [1]. There may not be so much big cheap low-hanging fruit now, but there is still plenty within reach. Bezos could be doing this instead of or as well as Blue Origin (which he's been funding at US$1 billion/year [2]). [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/…
Think of what the Vision Fund could have achieved with this mindset. I’d love for a billionaire to offer 18-25 year-olds, $25k for a summer to explore new projects. You could fund 1000 kids with promising projects for $25 million. If the next great innovation will start as a toy, we need to encourage people to make more toys.
Of course there are lots of problem with academic culture, like overemphasis on maximizing citation count. But the setup you describe will also require some form of simple metric to track progress- to ensure that 25k isn't going down the drain.
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Think of what the Vision Fund could have achieved with this mindset. I’d love for a billionaire to offer 18-25 year-olds, $25k for a summer to explore new projects. You could fund 1000 kids with promising projects for $25 million. If the next great innovation will start as a toy, we need to encourage people to make more toys.
Isn't this what universities basically do with graduate students? They tend to be a bit older, the pay maybe a little less, but universities does allow pretty high level of freedom. Of course there are lots of problem with academic culture, like overemphasis on maximizing citation count. But the setup you describe will also require some form of simple metric to track progress- to ensure that 25k isn't going down the…
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I think you’re really not giving L’Oreal the credit it deserves. It’s much more than just a lipstick vendor. Sanofi, Europe’s largest pharma company, has its roots in L’Oreal (L’Oreal previously was the parent company of Synthelabo, which used to be the #3 pharma company in Europe until it merged with Sanofi). L’Oreal also does research in things like methods to regrow human skin/hair, which aren’t on the same level…
Thanks for the context, but I suppose I just couldn't pass up on the poetic phrasing of "selling lipstick" a la Steve Jobs' "selling sugar water" phrase. Point still stands though. Even most of my PhD friends often lack fundamental understanding of how biology works, and I find it hard to believe an MBA can ever catch up no matter how much training they get. I'd argue that in general it also shows - biotechs run by s…
Real world experience trumps a degree in almost all cases. It certainly helps, but you don’t need a PhD to be a scientist, and you definitely don’t need one to lead scientists.
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There is a spectrum of the kinds of research one might do. My advisor always used to remind me that if a team of good engineers at a big corporation can do something, it's not a good research problem to tackle for a grad student in a uni lab. So we naturally tended to more speculative/fundamental problems, which seems like a good thing - instead of trying to compete with industry labs we augment them.
That sounds like a good thing, but realize that some day industry will build an application based on your ideas and patent the result. Patents are a monopoly on technology, and working for a university, probably the last thing you had in mind was that other people would monopolize your inventions so that their use would become limited.
Later in that decade with the success of Facebook, investors turned away from these investments and were more interested in finding the next Facebook. Essentially the 2000’s were a kind of lost decade in fundamental technology development. Most of what was built during the decade was the benefactor of cheap computing enabled by 50 years and trillions of dollars in semiconductor investment. Now that we are hitting the edge of what’s possible, it’s time for big, long term, hard tech investment.
It’s only been more recently where people like Elon Musk and to a lesser extent Larry Page at Alphabet have led the way by being willing to take big bets on technology development. In the last several years, we are finally starting to see some venture capital follow where investors are taking a long view and betting on a few “moonshots.” In the last couple years there have been big investments in computing with companies like Cerebrus doing wafer scale computing, PsiQuantum and Rigetti in quantum computing, and various optical computing companies to name a few. Of course, there has also been considerable investment in the AV space as well and the AV space will need lower power, cheaper solutions that you won’t be able to simply buy off the shelf and slap together like almost all of the AV companies are doing today.