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Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

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Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#141

Post by whimsicalism »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #86
whimsicalism wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAI I don’t really agree that training massive causal LMs is a “product focus”. I agree that there is an increasing product focus in orgs like OAI, but a lot of that is coming from new growth rather than trading off with base research.

> I don’t really agree that training massive causal LMs is a “product focus”. I'd hope that Google DeepMind's mission statement is a bit broader than that, but certainly Gemini seems to be the focus. It seems to me there's a world of difference between DeepMind's original goal of developing AGI (via whatever means - as a research objective), and now being told they have to build LLMs. If we compare Google to Meta, it…

Did you work in this field? I just don’t find that a fair characterization. They are all still doing blue-sky research.

There is a ton of further research to be done in deep models. A lot of it will incorporate LLMs because that is currently the most powerful primitive you have. Research is a lot more closed now but I would not take that to mean research is no longer happening.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#142

Post by whimsicalism »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #105
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how many, if any, are doing blue sky research (vs product-directed "research") any more the way that Bell Labs, IBM Watson and Xerox Parc used to do. Look at what's going on with ML/AI - DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAIR now moved into a product group alongside Meta's GenAI group, Microsoft essentially outsourcing AI to OpenAI, OpenAI may as well call itself GPTCo…

This is not an accurate portayal of these labs. They're all still doing blue sky research.

Seems like we have ended up on the wrong side of the HN hivemind, reality be damned.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#143

Post by saintfire »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #126
akho wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They likely just block non-us. Geoblocks for no prticular reason a really sad, but widespread, practice.

(op here) > They likely just block non-us. Link was and is working for me here in the uk.

That's pretty wild because its blocked for me in Canada, and usually we have the best parity with US content.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#144

Post by dsgnr »

dleink wrote: post #53
dsgnr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a freelance product designer I'm always learning and always excited about work. There are so many interesting companies working on so many interesting problems.

What takes up most of your time? Do you work with vendors to create and then produce the product or just do the design phase?

It depends on the needs of the client, and Ive done a little bit of everything from designing moulds and sourcing factories for physical products, to writing frontend code to help ship.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#145

Post by danielvaughn »

stuff4ben wrote: post #133
danielvaughn wrote: post #131

Several years back, I took a trip to a casino up in Connecticut. I'm not big into gambling, but my brother-in-law's mother was a high roller. She got an extra room for free, so we figured why not take advantage of it. We didn't spend much time with her while we were there, but on the last night she wanted to join us with some of her friends for dinner. Since I was going to be having dinner with a group of old retired…

Man, what an experience! I got goosebumps just reading that. So much history you could have learned. It's a shame you only got one evening with them. I mean you were with the pioneers of our field. It's like if you just happened to go out to dinner with a bunch of old men and they casually reveal, yes we played baseball too back in NY in 1932, hi, my name is George...

Yeah it was quite an experience. They were very old - in their late 70's. I got the sense that they retired somewhere between 1980-1990, which kinda tracks with the sudden gender imbalance in the field. Prior to the 80's, computing had a larger percentage of women in the industry.

I also got the sense that even though they knew Bells Labs was important, they weren't quite aware of just how fundamental it was to...well basically everything we do today.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#146

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

whimsicalism wrote: post #141
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t really agree that training massive causal LMs is a “product focus”. I'd hope that Google DeepMind's mission statement is a bit broader than that, but certainly Gemini seems to be the focus. It seems to me there's a world of difference between DeepMind's original goal of developing AGI (via whatever means - as a research objective), and now being told they have to build LLMs. If we compare Google to Meta, it…

Did you work in this field? I just don’t find that a fair characterization. They are all still doing blue-sky research. There is a ton of further research to be done in deep models. A lot of it will incorporate LLMs because that is currently the most powerful primitive you have. Research is a lot more closed now but I would not take that to mean research is no longer happening.

No - I don't work in the ML field, or for any of these companies (but I have built a Torch-like NN framework in C++ from scratch, and followed the early transformer development closely, so do understand the tech).

I'm just writing about the changes to these organizations, and their corporate governance, as reported in the press. I don't think you need to be an insider to appreciate the difference between, say, DeepMind as an independent entity pursuing AGI anyway they saw fit (RL), and now as part of Google DeepMind apparently tasked with developing SOTA LLMs. No doubt this is still a research vs pure engineering endeavor, but hard to call it blue sky when the research direction and goal is so proscribed. I personally don't believe that LLMs (or RL for that matter) are the path to AGI, but at least DeepMind used to have the flexibility to pivot and pursue whatever lines of research they felt were most promising. Do they still have that flexibility today?

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#147

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

whimsicalism wrote: post #142
Nimitz14 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an accurate portayal of these labs. They're all still doing blue sky research.

Seems like we have ended up on the wrong side of the HN hivemind, reality be damned.

Well, if you're an insider at one of these companies, then please enlighten us!

What has changed from DeepMind as independent entity to Google DeepMind (following the hivemind LLM "path" to AGI ;) ) ?

What does it mean for FAIR to now be part of a product group ?

I'm sure the CEOs of these companies hope these changes are significant and will better align these research organizations with their corporate goals and marketplace opportunities ...

Is OpenAI pursuing AGI-directed research outside of LLMs, or is it now all hands on deck towards next GPT 5.0 product release ?

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#148

Post by ascagnel_ »

jakderrida wrote: post #90
ioblomov wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I’m not saying Shannon never walked the halls of Murray Hill, his publishing A Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948 meant that he was working at the lab’s previous location in the West Village… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Laboratories_Building

1966?? So, like, pretty much all the world-changing, paradigm-shifting revelations were in West Village? So, while working with Verizon, they falsely claimed it to be Basking Ridge, NJ (which they bought and boasted as the Brains of Bell to invoke a symbolic victory of sorts) until I found out they were either lying or swindled and it was another place in Jersey. Yet again, I find out from you that it was just anothe…

Verizon’s current HQ (which is in Basking Ridge) used to be AT&T’s corporate HQ; as far as I’m aware, no significant Bell Labs work was ever done there, and Verizon has never had any legacy with Bell Labs.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#149

Post by jakderrida »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #148
jakderrida wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1966?? So, like, pretty much all the world-changing, paradigm-shifting revelations were in West Village? So, while working with Verizon, they falsely claimed it to be Basking Ridge, NJ (which they bought and boasted as the Brains of Bell to invoke a symbolic victory of sorts) until I found out they were either lying or swindled and it was another place in Jersey. Yet again, I find out from you that it was just anothe…

Verizon’s current HQ (which is in Basking Ridge) used to be AT&T’s corporate HQ; as far as I’m aware, no significant Bell Labs work was ever done there, and Verizon has never had any legacy with Bell Labs.

You know what? You might be right. However, Verizon seemed to pitch it as some sort of "brain" when I was there. At least, they definitely implied the transistor originated there. But thank you for clarification. Always appreciated.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#150

Post by ViktorRay »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #104

> “Let me tell you, I never felt I was going to work, never,” said Romero, who retired as a corporate accountant in 2009 from the famed Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill. Every. Single. Amazing endeavor that’s ever happened has people who describe contributing to that endeavor this way. Every one. It brings to mind the kind of world that could exist without profit motives, where people do things simply because th…

I used to feel the way you do. I am also a big Star Trek TNG fan.

But I feel in the real world the profit motive is pretty important. In systems that have been tried so far that attempted to eliminate the profit motive (Soviet system, Chinese economic system prior to free market reforms) the lack of profit motive seems to have led to stagnation and bloated centralized bureaucrats unable to do things effectively.

Also remember that there are lots of important jobs out there for society to function properly that are unglamorous. Lots of jobs in the medical field for example or waste disposal or toilet cleaning and so on. In a world without money who would be doing such jobs? Why would anyone clean toilets without being paid for it?

In the Star Trek utopia the assumption is that people would do it anyway for the betterment of society. But today in the real world it seems money and the profit motive is necessary both on a micro level and on a macro level.

EDIT: I realized this comment may come off as too argumentative. Not my intention. I sympathize with your underlying sentiment. I just wanted to add my thoughts too. I apologize if any of this came off as hostile in any way

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