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The Influence of Bell Labs

construction-physics.com

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Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#11

Post by querez »

phtrivier wrote: post #9

Okay, I'm really in a sad mood, so: tell me there will be places like that, again, somewhere, ever ? We need this. Like, really, we need someone to have created the xerox part of the 21st century, somewhere about 20 years ago. I honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know. I kno…

> honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know.

I'm pretty sure Google Brain was exactly what you are looking for: People like to think of DeepMind, but honestly, Brain pretty much had Bell Labs/PARCs strategy: they hired a bunch of brilliant people and told them to just "research whatever is you think is cool". And think all the AI innovations that came out of Brain and were given to the world for free: Transformers, Vision Transformers, Diffusion Models, BERT (I'd consider that the first public LLM), Adam, and a gazillion of other cool stuff I can't think of right now.... Essentially, all of the current AI/LLM craze started at Brain.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#13

Post by phtrivier »

querez wrote: post #11
phtrivier wrote: post #9

Okay, I'm really in a sad mood, so: tell me there will be places like that, again, somewhere, ever ? We need this. Like, really, we need someone to have created the xerox part of the 21st century, somewhere about 20 years ago. I honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know. I kno…

> honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know. I'm pretty sure Google Brain was exactly what you are looking for: People like to think of DeepMind, but honestly, Brain pretty much had Bell Labs/PARCs strategy: they hired a bunch of brilliant people and told them to just "researc…

Right. And I'm sure that if I ever get in a better mood, I'll find that the current AI/LLM craze is good for _something_.

Right now the world needs GWh batteries made of salt, cheap fusion from trash, telepathy, a cure for cancer and a vaccine for the common cold - but in the meantime, advertisers can generate photos for their ads, which is, _good_, I guess ?

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#14

Post by aatd86 »

phtrivier wrote: post #13
querez wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know. I'm pretty sure Google Brain was exactly what you are looking for: People like to think of DeepMind, but honestly, Brain pretty much had Bell Labs/PARCs strategy: they hired a bunch of brilliant people and told them to just "researc…

Right. And I'm sure that if I ever get in a better mood, I'll find that the current AI/LLM craze is good for _something_. Right now the world needs GWh batteries made of salt, cheap fusion from trash, telepathy, a cure for cancer and a vaccine for the common cold - but in the meantime, advertisers can generate photos for their ads, which is, _good_, I guess ?

Can't you get telepathy from training AI on functional MRI data? And then finding a way to pinpoint and activate brain regions remotely?

I mean brain-machine interfaces have been improving for quite a while.

Telepathy might even already exist.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#15

Post by Swizec »

Everyone wants Bell Labs, but not the thing that made it possible — high corporate profit taxes. They were making bucket loads of monopoly money and had to put it somewhere or taxes would it away.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#16

Post by eurikfkdks »

phtrivier wrote: post #13
querez wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know. I'm pretty sure Google Brain was exactly what you are looking for: People like to think of DeepMind, but honestly, Brain pretty much had Bell Labs/PARCs strategy: they hired a bunch of brilliant people and told them to just "researc…

Right. And I'm sure that if I ever get in a better mood, I'll find that the current AI/LLM craze is good for _something_. Right now the world needs GWh batteries made of salt, cheap fusion from trash, telepathy, a cure for cancer and a vaccine for the common cold - but in the meantime, advertisers can generate photos for their ads, which is, _good_, I guess ?

Rolling back the 1980s neoliberal cultural ideals of letting markets and profits be the highest arbiter of societal direction is the key.

Silicon Valley hippies have been replaced by folks focussed on monetisation and growth.

It’s not great for the west, but those problems are being tackled. We just don’t get to read about it because ‘China bad’ and the fear of what capital flight might do to arguably inflated US stock prices

https://www.energy-storage.news/byd-launches-sodium-ion-grid...

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#17

Post by phtrivier »

aatd86 wrote: post #14
phtrivier wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. And I'm sure that if I ever get in a better mood, I'll find that the current AI/LLM craze is good for _something_. Right now the world needs GWh batteries made of salt, cheap fusion from trash, telepathy, a cure for cancer and a vaccine for the common cold - but in the meantime, advertisers can generate photos for their ads, which is, _good_, I guess ?

Can't you get telepathy from training AI on functional MRI data? And then finding a way to pinpoint and activate brain regions remotely? I mean brain-machine interfaces have been improving for quite a while. Telepathy might even already exist.

Indeed. Come to think of it, telepathy would bring chaos to society, ruin everyone's life, and open considerable advertising space - it's way more likely to be invented soon than a vaccine for the common cold.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#18

Post by leoc »

Pasting my comment on the article https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-would-it-take-to... :

> RCA Laboratories/the Sarnoff Research Center is surely one of the most important of the American corporate labs with similarities to Bell Labs. (It features prominently in Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... : it has a big role in the history of the Japanese semiconductor industry, in large part because of its roles in the development of the transistor and the LCD and its thirst for patent-licensing money.)

>> In Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik argues that by the 1990s PARC was no longer engaged in such unrestricted research decoupled from product development.

> According to Hiltzik and most other sources, the PARC Computer Science Lab's salad days were over as early as 1983, when Bob Taylor was forced to leave, while the work of the other PARC labs focussed on physics and materials science wasn't as notable in the period up to then.

Seriously: if this kind of thing interests you at all, go and read We Were Burning.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#19

Post by thrance »

Swizec wrote: post #15

Everyone wants Bell Labs, but not the thing that made it possible — high corporate profit taxes. They were making bucket loads of monopoly money and had to put it somewhere or taxes would it away.

Yes, disincentivize dividends and buybacks, reincentivize investments, R&D and others.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#20

Post by querez »

phtrivier wrote: post #13
querez wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know. I'm pretty sure Google Brain was exactly what you are looking for: People like to think of DeepMind, but honestly, Brain pretty much had Bell Labs/PARCs strategy: they hired a bunch of brilliant people and told them to just "researc…

Right. And I'm sure that if I ever get in a better mood, I'll find that the current AI/LLM craze is good for _something_. Right now the world needs GWh batteries made of salt, cheap fusion from trash, telepathy, a cure for cancer and a vaccine for the common cold - but in the meantime, advertisers can generate photos for their ads, which is, _good_, I guess ?

It does sound like you're in a particularly bad mood, so yes, maybe our outlook does change. Maybe it helps to think of a darker timeline where Google would have kept all of these advances to itself and improved its ad revenue. Instead it shared the research freely with the world. And call me naive, but I use LLMs almost daily, so there definitely _is_ something of value that came out of all this progress. But YMMV, of course.
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