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Off-topic: Growing up in the late 80's and going to college in 2000's, I've always romanticized about places such as Bell Labs and Xero Parc in terms of their t
by fermienrico 8y ago
Off-topic: Growing up in the late 80's and going to college in 2000's, I've always romanticized about places such as Bell Labs and Xero Parc in terms of their talent pool, innovation and revolutionary ideas. It feels like all the cool stuff happened 30-40 years ago.
What are some of the modern equivalent of such places?
I can think of Boston Dynamics.
- WestCoastJustin 8y agoAmazon, Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX, etc [1]. Just look at what companies are pumping 10's of billions of R&D dollars into. But, they are doing some very cool things at Google & some of the X bets. I suspect that's why Rob Pike is there today. Personally, SpaceX looks like they are also very much pushing the envelop technically and must be a very cool place to work [2]. By the way, this was a pretty awesome talk. Rob also helped created UTF-8 & Go [3]. Pretty amazing career. [1] https://www.recode.net/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-development-rd https://www.recode.net/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-dev... [2] https://youtu.be/u0-pfzKbh2k?t=19 https://youtu.be/u0-pfzKbh2k?t=19 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike
- ori_b 8y ago> Amazon, Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX, etc [1]. Just look at what companies are pumping 10's of billions of R&D dollars into. What fundamental research are they pumping money into, regardless of imminent commercial promise? What set Bell Labs apart was the level of fudnamental "Well, we have no idea where this will go, but we can afford to throw some of our monopoly money at it" environment.
- jplayer01 8y agoI'd say the only one really doing blue sky in any sense of the word is Microsoft. Most of their stuff in R&D never comes to market and is never intended to as its entire purpose.
- ezoe 8y agoYou mean, Windows?
- ygra 8y agoWindows isn't exactly a Microsoft Research project ...
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoNot deliberately.
- pjmlp 8y agoHowever, many technology stacks in use on Windows like WSL picoprocesses, .NET generics, MDIL later replaced by .NET Native, Secure Kernel, Z3 theorem prover for drivers, P language for Windows 8 USB stack, ... have their origins in MSR work.
- chillee 8y agoI'd say things like AlphaGo are "fundamental research". Really, any of the top tier AI labs do what's often considered blue skies research, and have a huge concentration of talent. Microsoft also has a long legacy of funding a large variety of CS research.
- ori_b 8y agoBell labs didn't just do CS research, and the CS researchers weren't separated from the other researchers. The physicists worked with the chemists who worked with the computer scientists who worked with the theorists who worked with every other field.
- coldtea 8y agoXerox Parc fits your question, but the interesting parts of Bell Labs, i.e. the ones we use today (UNIX, C, etc) wasn't any "fundamental research" either.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago> but the interesting parts of Bell Labs, i.e. the ones we use today (UNIX, C, etc) wasn't any "fundamental research" either. What about transistors? Don't we use them today?
- coldtea 8y agoWe do, but that's not the part of Bell Labs people usually reminisce about in a programming context or the era TFA talks about.
- pjmlp 8y agoActually had Bell Labs been allowed to sell UNIX and we most likely wouldn't be using it today.
- rpeden 8y agoFor Microsoft, at least, take a look at work done by Leslie Lamport and Simon Peyton Jones while working for Microsoft Research. Look at the papers they've published, and also what they work on - things like TLA+ for Lamport and Haskell for SPJ. I'd argue that both of these guys do interesting and important CS work that doesn't have an immediate commercial payoff for Microsoft. They're far from the only ones doing good CS research at MS; they're just the first that came to mind.
- atq2119 8y agoThe list of companies you give doesn't quite work. Bell Labs and Xerox Parc were small organizations within a larger company. The vast majority of people in the companies you listed are doing work that has nowhere near the density of interestingness that happened in Xerox Parc, for example. There might be individual departments in those companies that are comparable -- in Microsoft Research perhaps, and a sibling comment points out Alpha Go. Anyway, the point is: Working at Alphabet or Intel or any of these is nothing like working at Xerox Parc, unless you happen to be in a very special place within those companies. But then, such special places are bound to exist elsewhere as well, in particular in small startups that are doing genuinely interesting things.
- bch 8y agoIsn’t it early to say Boston Dynamics has had any impact, outside of the occasional cool YouTube video? Neat, without a doubt... Re: other modern equivalents - would free software, in general, count? We get to observe first hand, tinker-with, talk-to-creators-of, and contribute-to some of the heaviest-lifting software ever. Linux and BSDs, MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra, Python, Blender... any of those, or others, and the right research paper or YouTube video or book, and there’s a good chance you can have your mind blown.
- int0x80 8y agoI think open source is indeed the continuation of that. The hole linux community, gnu/gcc, bsd etc. There are really very talented people working there making huge impact on how things work today and will work in the near future (at least). And I think the key here is the community actitute and ecosystem. The hole 'huge communities driven by the goal of creating good/the best possible technology and code' and not directly (I know big companies are in, but they still have to play the community game/rules) by comercial or political agendas.
- fasquoika 8y agoAlan Kay has asserted repeatedly that there's no place like Xerox Parc in the modern world. Not necessarily authoritative, but something to think about.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoPARC wasn't just a ridiculous concentration of money and very smart people with a budget, it was a ridiculous concentration of money and very smart people who had creativity and vision. There's nothing like it today, because the only vision you'll find in the current crop of smart+budget shops is how to make more cash from ads and/or the web. Even at SpaceX, the getting-to-Mars vision is more than fifty years old. PARC was about enhancing human creativity, cognition, and potential, and everything else came from that. Not only is no one is working in that space today, but all the big smart+budget shops are more likely to pollute that space than contribute to it.
- stickfigure 8y agoThis is unreasonably uncharitable. I have doubts about its commercial viability, but Magic Leap seems pretty ambitious. Microsoft has been exploring all kinds of exotic technologies, some of which make it into production (kinect, hololens) and some of which don't (the original 'surface'). Alphabet has a bunch of moonshots that sound like vanity projects to me but if even one of them works out it may change the world (Waymo seems closest). Even the much-maligned Google Glass is a preview of the future. It sounds like your standard for creativity and vision requires rewinding time to a more naive state. Peter Norton made a fortune by selling software that would undelete files. At the time it was amazing!
- danso 8y agoI agree that Microsoft is doing some interesting work (including in open source) that may cause more buzz if Microsoft wasn’t saddled with the legacy of Windows and cubicle computing. I wonder how exciting/sexy Xerox’s corporate image was back in the heyday of Xerox PARC?
- 8y ago
- RickSanchez2600 8y agoAT&T Bell Labs made videos like this: https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?list=FLHa3ljE2SLOERhULuoHNx-Q https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?list=FLHa3ljE2SLOERhULuoHNx-Q
- Aloha 8y agoThat intro is clearly the result of too slowly delivered cue cards - it was painful to watch.
- jonsen 8y agoI easily got each and every word spoken. And had time to think. A lot of old videos have a pleasant pacing. Rob Pike 2018 — on average i got two out of three words and had to spend mental effort on interpolating — that was painful.
- ontouchstart 8y agoI totally agree with you. I watched the video so many times that I "bookmarked it" with a one-cell Jupyter Notebook: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/ontouchstart/colab_notebook/blob/master/YouTubeVideo_Unix_ATT.ipynb https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/ontouchstart/colab_noteb...
- andyjohnson0 8y agoIBM's research division used to have a good reputation for innovative, long-term work - especially in maths/CS and physics. I'm not sure how much of that has survived the recent changes in the company. Anyone want to comment on what it's like now?