Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

answer.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#21

Post by riemannzeta »

eries wrote: post #19
riemannzeta wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure who's better positioned to answer, you or Jeremy and I asked him already: How are you thinking about the role of patenting at Answer.AI? How about handling tech transfer issues with universities?

I've never been a big fan of patents as they've historically applied to software. But this is a public policy issue, not something an individual company can fix. So I've always been content to follow patent best practices, even when they aren't the most logical. In terms of tech transfer, Jeremy has quite a bit of experience with collaborating with the best academic labs, especially in machine learning, so I expect w…

Makes sense. We have to work within the system as we find it. Would be great to see the system evolve in a way that would support efforts like yours though!

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#22

Post by Animats »

The classic on the early electrical manufacturers is "The electrical manufacturers 1875-1900".[1] This is the Harvard Business School take on Edison. The business plan for his first power plant is in there. (He way underestimated the payback period, but it was only a few years, so it worked out.) There's also "Men and Volts"[2], a history of the early days of General Electric. Which, I think, is where this article got their info on tungsten.

The big corporate labs were part of far larger manufacturing companies. It's not clear that a standalone lab can function in the same way.

[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.4159/harvard.97806...

[2] https://archive.org/details/menandvoltsstory00hammrich

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#23

Post by lokimedes »

The best of luck to you guys, and excellent article by Eric. I recently came across his freaktales.com site, and was delighted to find another fan of the bygone age of R&D.

We also just launched Unbelievable Labs (unbelievablelabs.com), with the ambition to combine Physics-oriented venture building with applied research. It would be great to form a network of these to emulate some of the scale that Bell Labs had due to monopoly funding.

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#24

Post by jph00 »

5rest wrote: post #10
jph00 wrote: post #3

Jeremy from Answer.AI here -- Answer.AI is, to some extent, the subject of this article. Perhaps worth noting here that we didn't pay the author, Eric Gilliam; it's his independent analysis based on years of study of 19th & 20th century R&D labs. I'm hoping that not only will Answer.AI be successful, but that Eric's words in the conclusion will come to pass: > "If their USD10 million experiment works, it has the chan…

Jeremy, you've taken a bold, open initiative. Thank you for calling on all the small, innovative teams. To better understand the types of projects or applications that excite you and Eric most, could you share examples of companies or applications that Answer.AI currently supports or plants to invest in? Additionally, if yo u have any published articles detailing these ventures please share the link. Best wishes with…

We don't invest -- we build! The idea is that we want to create lots of AI-powered applications, based on a common platform.

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#25

Post by jph00 »

riemannzeta wrote: post #7
jph00 wrote: post #3

Jeremy from Answer.AI here -- Answer.AI is, to some extent, the subject of this article. Perhaps worth noting here that we didn't pay the author, Eric Gilliam; it's his independent analysis based on years of study of 19th & 20th century R&D labs. I'm hoping that not only will Answer.AI be successful, but that Eric's words in the conclusion will come to pass: > "If their USD10 million experiment works, it has the chan…

How are you thinking about the role of patenting at Answer.AI? How about handling tech transfer issues with universities?

I don't think we'll want to patent anything, since that's something which keeps people out -- and we want to let people in! The only reason I could think of that we'd need a patent portfolio would be for defensive purposes.

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#26

Post by jph00 »

tikkun wrote: post #6
jph00 wrote: post #3

Jeremy from Answer.AI here -- Answer.AI is, to some extent, the subject of this article. Perhaps worth noting here that we didn't pay the author, Eric Gilliam; it's his independent analysis based on years of study of 19th & 20th century R&D labs. I'm hoping that not only will Answer.AI be successful, but that Eric's words in the conclusion will come to pass: > "If their USD10 million experiment works, it has the chan…

Awesome! What sorts of products is your lab working on?

Currently we're working on low-resource fine-tuning research (i.e. train larger models on smaller cheaper GPUs), and looking into applications in the education and legal spaces. We're also starting to look at intersections between long-tail image recognition and language models.

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#27

Post by jph00 »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #12
jph00 wrote: post #3

Jeremy from Answer.AI here -- Answer.AI is, to some extent, the subject of this article. Perhaps worth noting here that we didn't pay the author, Eric Gilliam; it's his independent analysis based on years of study of 19th & 20th century R&D labs. I'm hoping that not only will Answer.AI be successful, but that Eric's words in the conclusion will come to pass: > "If their USD10 million experiment works, it has the chan…

Fast.AI is awesome and how I first learned ML. Can’t than you enough for that great project and its impact on my career! How do you see Answer.AI as supporting other commercial research efforts that have some overlap with the open source community? I’m thinking of things like Unsloth, which is trying to take a wild swing at efficient fine-tuning of LLMs without getting scooped by big tech.

Very keen to support open source work, both financially and through our own code.

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#28

Post by jiyunakenkyusha »

I am a researcher working in an industrial research lab who is in the process of changing careers (with research being more of a hobby rather than something that’s subject to performance reviews) due to my disagreements with the short-term focus of upper management and the constant pressure to “deliver value” on a regular basis. This post from Answer.ai was quite timely for me, and I am rooting for the lab to succeed! We need more research institutions that are free from either short-term business demands or the “publish or perish” system of academic research. Such freedom will encourage more ambitious, riskier research that could potentially have a greater payoff for our field and for society in general. I hope that Answer.ai will prove to be a successful model that balances business concerns with the risk-taking and exploration that comes with great research. If Answer.ai is successful, this will give me hope in the future of long-term research.

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#29

Post by bugglebeetle »

jph00 wrote: post #27
bugglebeetle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast.AI is awesome and how I first learned ML. Can’t than you enough for that great project and its impact on my career! How do you see Answer.AI as supporting other commercial research efforts that have some overlap with the open source community? I’m thinking of things like Unsloth, which is trying to take a wild swing at efficient fine-tuning of LLMs without getting scooped by big tech.

Very keen to support open source work, both financially and through our own code.

That’s great to hear! I can’t think of better stewards for this kind of work than a team you’ve put together, especially given everything you’ve provided for the community.

Re: Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

#30

Post by gradschoolfail »

publicdaniel wrote: post #14

@Jeremy, have you ever encountered Ken Stanley’s book “Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective”? If you’re not familiar with him, he was the guy that invented the NEAT algorithm, Novelty Search, etc. In his book he talks about stepping stones and following what’s “interesting” to individuals. It seems like Answer.AI is focused on applied engineering, but any thoughts on this type of approach from a…

This is funnily relevant because as far as I understand Ken is or was a research manager at OpenAI, and as outlined in the article, Answer.AI is trying not to be OpenAI.
Post reply on HN