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Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

answer.ai

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

#51

Post by fxtentacle »

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…

My experience is that many large companies have problems that could be solved/improved with small fine-tuned AI services, but usually they are extremely cagey about disclosing which parts of their workflow are slow/expensive and would, therefore, be the best targets for automation and/or improvements coming from AI research. The cliche example here would be to automate processing of some paper forms. And it's cliche precisely because for most companies it would help them become faster and more competitive.

How do you plan to research potential problems to solve?

Would it be possible to publish and discuss those to-be-solved problems, so that hobbyists can also try their luck at solving them?

Initially, I thought that Kaggle competitions would be a great way to get the industry's problems into the hands of motivated problem-solvers. But I don't think I've ever seen a large car manufacturer (for example) as Kaggle competition host. So it looks like something is holding companies back.

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

#52

Post by a_petrov »

jph00 wrote: post #26
tikkun wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yesterday I had the thought of what we could achieve right now with let's say 3 x A2000 leftover GPUs from a random second-hand crypto mining rig.

I think it would be awesome to be able to use GPUs from second-hand crypto mining rigs for cheaper fine-tuning research.

Good luck! As an enthusiast who loves The Lean Startup and who recently started playing around with LLMs, I'm super stoked about Answer.AI

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

#54

Post by fuzzfactor »

Animats wrote: post #22

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 go…

A standalone lab can be good to have.

You wouldn't want it to function the same way as a modern corporate lab. Those are already making as much progress as they can by now.

Something worthwhile to do in a smaller organization is things that bigger labs need but don't do.

If you do it "right" a single-handed individual can make more promising creative progress than a whole team of corporate researchers can often end up with, but you need some pretty good breadth of innovation.

If you look carefully at the historical illustration, you may notice a pipe organ is the central device in the picture.

In the natural science lab I always liked to have different instruments that attract the attention of different types of visitors at different times.

And some instruments that are only developed or used in the presence of no visitors at all.

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

#55

Post by fuzzfactor »

egillia3 wrote: post #34
Animats wrote: post #22

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 go…

Hey it’s Eric (the author). I talk quite a bit in the article about how to make the lessons of places like Bell and GE work even if you’re not attached to a large lab. Repurposing Bell-style systems engineers to isolate white hot problems is one example. Another is the general BBN-style approach which worked for them as a stand-alone R&D firm. I have stand alone pieces where I explore both of those quite a bit. In ge…

Excellent article.

I'm going to have to look at some of your other material.

Experimentation is different than other research or engineering but I think anything that amounts to a "system" can benefit from a systems problem solver who can perform as needed across the whole system.

Any organization is fortunate to have a person who can go without routine or typical workdays and do this.

It does seem like the bigger companies which have the most clearly defined roles can eventually get by on momentum without having anyone at all in a creative problem-solving position.

OTOH a small outfit can deploy unique problem-solving ability using only a handful of people that many corporations have none of. So the "very, very best people" may be what can get the momentum going to begin with given the right opportunity.

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

#56

Post by growingkittens »

eries wrote: post #16
growingkittens wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was an average workday like?

Well, considering we only just started, we haven't encountered any average workdays yet. I still hold out hope, though, that one day we will.

Sorry - I meant a workday at the GE Research lab you mentioned.
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