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The Influence of Bell Labs

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Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#131

Post by phtrivier »

Spooky23 wrote: post #100
phtrivier wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the smartphone is making sure you'll get plenty of access to the people who will prevent you from taking the vaccines or the cancer therapies (which, sadly, have _not_ been progressing as much as we would need.)

Google immunotherapy bro. Vaccines are in a golden age, except political assholes are stoking ignorance and rejection. In fact the two are advancing together. Bespoke vaccines for your cancer in in trial now.

No it's not, but thanks for assuming.

I'll be sure call to you when I meet the first real person cured from cancer by immunotherapy. So I far I only met people who died of cancer. But if you tell me we're in a "golden age", I suppose it will be over soon.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#132

Post by clayhacks »

aguaviva wrote: post #127
fragmede wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you don't buy that LLMs and the transformer architecture in particular will lead to AGI, and then artificial super intelligence (ASI), the quest to try and make ASI is far more significant than anything that's ever come before. ASI would be the last thing that humans need to invent. https://youtu.be/fa8k8IQ1_X0

We'll see if it comes to anything, first. Until then, it doesn't have the property of being significant.

I mean it’s possible we don’t see it. Or perhaps don’t see it very much before it’s ridiculously smart. A lot of AI research is at private companies who only share some details when they formally release a model. If they could make an AI researcher AI, they may be inclined to keep it to themselves for a bit while they let it improve itself for a few generations.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#133

Post by refurb »

thrance wrote: post #19
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.

That makes no sense. Dividents and buybacks are both taxed.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#134

Post by Qwertious »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #33
linguae wrote: post #10

During my teenage and college years in the 2000s, I was inspired by what I’ve read about Bell Labs, and I wanted to work as a computer science researcher in industry. I’ve also been inspired by Xerox PARC’s 1970s and 1980s researchers. I pursued that goal, and I’ve worked for a few industrial research labs before I switched careers to full-time community college teaching a few months ago. One thing I lament is the de…

The truth is that kind of research can only happen with a very rich monopoly. Bell labs came about when AT&T was the monopoly telephone provider in the US. PARC happened when Xerox had a very lucrative monopoly on copy machines.

>The truth is that kind of research can only happen with a very rich monopoly.

A classification which includes government funding, note.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#135

Post by kranke155 »

toast0 wrote: post #74
kranke155 wrote: post #2

Just reading the book The Idea Factory, it was incredible amount of innovation. Lasers, early satellites, transistors. And it was all done, apparently, at least in the beginning, because they hired smart people and they let them do what they wanted.

Almost all of the things I can think of that came from bell labs are things that helped their business. The only thing that I don't know how it helped their business was Hemo the Magnificent and similar films; but I'm sure those helped with PR. Monopoly may have helped them pay for such r&d, but vertical integration is what made it possible for so much r&d to be relevant to the business.

I think it ended up helping their business because they deliberately made it so later, but it’s not clear how some inventions would help their business in advance. From the book there was quite a few things that sat on the shelf for years until someone figured out a way to use them later.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#136

Post by Spooky23 »

phtrivier wrote: post #131
Spooky23 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google immunotherapy bro. Vaccines are in a golden age, except political assholes are stoking ignorance and rejection. In fact the two are advancing together. Bespoke vaccines for your cancer in in trial now.

No it's not, but thanks for assuming. I'll be sure call to you when I meet the first real person cured from cancer by immunotherapy. So I far I only met people who died of cancer. But if you tell me we're in a "golden age", I suppose it will be over soon.

A good friend was in a Nivo/Ipi clinical trial in 2018/19 for metastatic melanoma. Melanoma is among the most aggressive cancers - it killed my beautiful wife in about 6 months. My friend is still alive and doing well. Prior to those trials, the 3 year survival rate was 0. Today, the 5 year survival rate is 65%.

Before the anti-vax lunatics moved in and captured the narrative in social media, President Trump’s extensive funding and regulatory acceleration of the COVID vaccines saved many thousands of lives. The design of the vaccine was done in days and available in weeks. That’s a golden age.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#137

Post by mathgladiator »

phtrivier wrote: post #84
querez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I would love to find a way llms could help me right now. "Hey, xchatgclaudma, please conjure up time and energy out of thin air ?"

Current LLMs seem to be OK code generators when constrained well. I'm building a product with my hands tied behind my back when I only use Claude. Its... working.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#138

Post by mathgladiator »

My dream was to do research, but I didn't see academics as happy people. Instead, I had a great career, and now I mess around on my own programming language. Maybe it will become something, may it will not. Life is a mystery.

It has been fun spending a few years building my vision ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ), but it's hard to communicate it all. I've come to the conclusion, the real magic that makes Research work is having a place where people can collaborate and work together in a shared culture.

At this point, I don't want to hire people into my endeavor, and I can't seem to find a co-founder to do commercialization right.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#139

Post by phtrivier »

Spooky23 wrote: post #136
phtrivier wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not, but thanks for assuming. I'll be sure call to you when I meet the first real person cured from cancer by immunotherapy. So I far I only met people who died of cancer. But if you tell me we're in a "golden age", I suppose it will be over soon.

A good friend was in a Nivo/Ipi clinical trial in 2018/19 for metastatic melanoma. Melanoma is among the most aggressive cancers - it killed my beautiful wife in about 6 months. My friend is still alive and doing well. Prior to those trials, the 3 year survival rate was 0. Today, the 5 year survival rate is 65%. Before the anti-vax lunatics moved in and captured the narrative in social media, President Trump’s extens…

Sorry for your loss. Happy for your friend.

I guess it's a case where the future is there, but we badly need to get it "more evenly distributed".

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