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Hold on. Corporate research labs are _fundamentally different_ than academic research labs. Why? Time horizon. Companies will not fund research that has a m

by mhneu 6y ago

Hold on. Corporate research labs are _fundamentally different_ than academic research labs. Why? Time horizon. Companies will not fund research that has a more-than-20-year expected time to product. Usually, they won't fund things that will take more than 10 years to go from R&D to product. That's because of investment-- think about startups, what LP wants to put money in a fund for more than 20 years? On the other hand, academic labs, funded by governments, often do work that pays off more than 20 years later. Think about Watson and Crick - their work on DNA in the 40s and 50s led to antibody drugs in the 1980s that are now being used widely today. Bell Labs was the exception that tried to do long-term, basic research work, and its failure proves that corporate funding will eventually dry up for any long-term research. There's just no business case. The US has the biggest tech and biotech economy in the world because the US government (that is, US citizens and US society) was smart to fund longterm basic research at the highest level in the world, building universities that attract some of the best talent in the world. Corporate research labs do more short-term work.

Avicebron 6y ago
That fund is rapidly drying up for Biotech. We have a huge under investment into many different forms of healthcare and novel medicines.
chrisco255 6y ago
Bell Labs was a massively successful experiment. It didn't try to do basic research work. It developed: synchronous sound motion pictures, the photovoltaic cell, encrypted speech transmission, the transistor, the laser, electronic music, cellular telephones, optical tweezers and discovered cosmic microwaves, among other things. Why did it fade, though? AT&T was able to fund Bell Labs when it still had a monopoly over the telephone market. The article claims that antitrust laws were relaxed in the 80s, but AT&T was broken up in 1982 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System). This break up lead to increased competition and innovation in telecom, but it did come at the cost of Bell Labs losing funding until eventually being spun off into Lucent. Peter Thiel argued in the book Zero to One that only monopoly (or pseudo monopoly) businesses can afford to fund surplus salaries and corporate research labs that cost billions of dollars with potentially little or no gain for many years. I would argue that if a corporation exists in a competitive industry, their margins are driven too low to fund basic research. Also note: even in the U.S. corporations fund a good chunk of basic research in academia: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern...
thu2111 6y ago
Corporate labs do fund very long term research. Google was interested in and working on AI more or less from the early years (anyone remember Google Sets?), it's still funding fundamental AI research more than 20 years later. Now they've been funding self driving cars for more than 10 years and still do so. The reason it appears rare is because funding research on the assumption it might be useful in more than 20 years from now is extremely wasteful. Companies don't work so far ahead because the risk of just going down a dead-end for half a lifetime is very, very high. In academia that doesn't matter because people are rewarded merely for researching novel things, in the real world people are rewarded for doing things that are useful. It matters. For every DNA you can cite, others can cite dead end branches that despite decades of research have gone nowhere and probably never will. In CS, how many programmers are using Haskell every day? It's been in development for 35 years yet virtually nobody uses it - the new languages that gain traction (Rust, Swift, Go, Kotlin etc) invariably come from corporate R&D labs, and outside of a few bits of useful syntax borrow little from academic research languages. Even Haskellers have admitted now that lazyness was a dead end, new FP langs like Idris don't have it. Practically the entire field of PL research was swallowed up by FP and continues to be dominated by that paradigm (e.g. dependent types), despite the vast majority of PL users being disinterested in them. Computational epidemiology. It's been researched for >20 years yet the models are always wrong. There are private sector epi models, but not surprisingly little work is done on them because there's obviously a missing piece, and developing huge and insanely complex simulations (e.g. the 15,000 LOC monster Ferguson produced) is obviously a dead end. String theory. How much time has been sunk into that? Not a single testable prediction. And in biology. You know, one biotech firm found 9 in 10 papers don't replicate. Papers professional labs can't replicate is not "useful in 20 years". That's "not useful today and never". People were selectively breeding for many centuries. Agritech firms would have eventually figured out the structure of DNA if Watson and Crick hadn't. Meanwhile we tend to take for granted all the long term R&D projects the private sector does because it's much better at finding useful outcomes quicker. It doesn't need to wait 20 years to find products out of the research it does, and that's good!
- anchpop 6y ago
  > Practically the entire field of PL research was swallowed up by FP and continues to be dominated by that paradigm (e.g. dependent types), despite the vast majority of PL users being disinterested in them. I couldn't disagree with this more. I'm biased because I really like PL research, but when I look at modern languages like Rust, Haskell's shadow is plain to see. ADTs, immutability and parametric polymorphism for instance.

by mhneu 6y ago

Avicebron 6y ago

That fund is rapidly drying up for Biotech. We have a huge under investment into many different forms of healthcare and novel medicines.

chrisco255 6y ago

Bell Labs was a massively successful experiment. It didn't try to do basic research work. It developed: synchronous sound motion pictures, the photovoltaic cell, encrypted speech transmission, the transistor, the laser, electronic music, cellular telephones, optical tweezers and discovered cosmic microwaves, among other things. Why did it fade, though? AT&T was able to fund Bell Labs when it still had a monopoly over the telephone market. The article claims that antitrust laws were relaxed in the 80s, but AT&T was broken up in 1982 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System). This break up lead to increased competition and innovation in telecom, but it did come at the cost of Bell Labs losing funding until eventually being spun off into Lucent. Peter Thiel argued in the book Zero to One that only monopoly (or pseudo monopoly) businesses can afford to fund surplus salaries and corporate research labs that cost billions of dollars with potentially little or no gain for many years. I would argue that if a corporation exists in a competitive industry, their margins are driven too low to fund basic research. Also note: even in the U.S. corporations fund a good chunk of basic research in academia: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern...

thu2111 6y ago

Corporate labs do fund very long term research. Google was interested in and working on AI more or less from the early years (anyone remember Google Sets?), it's still funding fundamental AI research more than 20 years later. Now they've been funding self driving cars for more than 10 years and still do so. The reason it appears rare is because funding research on the assumption it might be useful in more than 20 years from now is extremely wasteful. Companies don't work so far ahead because the risk of just going down a dead-end for half a lifetime is very, very high. In academia that doesn't matter because people are rewarded merely for researching novel things, in the real world people are rewarded for doing things that are useful. It matters. For every DNA you can cite, others can cite dead end branches that despite decades of research have gone nowhere and probably never will. In CS, how many programmers are using Haskell every day? It's been in development for 35 years yet virtually nobody uses it - the new languages that gain traction (Rust, Swift, Go, Kotlin etc) invariably come from corporate R&D labs, and outside of a few bits of useful syntax borrow little from academic research languages. Even Haskellers have admitted now that lazyness was a dead end, new FP langs like Idris don't have it. Practically the entire field of PL research was swallowed up by FP and continues to be dominated by that paradigm (e.g. dependent types), despite the vast majority of PL users being disinterested in them. Computational epidemiology. It's been researched for >20 years yet the models are always wrong. There are private sector epi models, but not surprisingly little work is done on them because there's obviously a missing piece, and developing huge and insanely complex simulations (e.g. the 15,000 LOC monster Ferguson produced) is obviously a dead end. String theory. How much time has been sunk into that? Not a single testable prediction. And in biology. You know, one biotech firm found 9 in 10 papers don't replicate. Papers professional labs can't replicate is not "useful in 20 years". That's "not useful today and never". People were selectively breeding for many centuries. Agritech firms would have eventually figured out the structure of DNA if Watson and Crick hadn't. Meanwhile we tend to take for granted all the long term R&D projects the private sector does because it's much better at finding useful outcomes quicker. It doesn't need to wait 20 years to find products out of the research it does, and that's good!

anchpop 6y ago
> Practically the entire field of PL research was swallowed up by FP and continues to be dominated by that paradigm (e.g. dependent types), despite the vast majority of PL users being disinterested in them. I couldn't disagree with this more. I'm biased because I really like PL research, but when I look at modern languages like Rust, Haskell's shadow is plain to see. ADTs, immutability and parametric polymorphism for instance.