9 ms·

A growing number of governments hope to clone DARPA

113 points by edward 5y ago

ourmandave 5y ago
Just start with a big BIG pile of cash and work back from there. https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/budget https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/budget
- chc4 5y ago
  3.5 billion for every DARPA project is a hilariously low number. DARPA projects are famous for having low budgets, completing under budget, and completing under time. It has an extremely worthwhile return on investment.
  - pedalpete 5y ago
    I'd be keen to see a source on this if you have one.
  - Donald 5y ago
    No US government research project aims to be under budget. Money is viewed as a finite expiring resource and there's every incentive to avoid your contractors from returning ceiling to the government. I would not consider DARPA work to be low budget. DARPA programs are very typically in the $50 million range and program resources are split up between multiple performers. Sometimes larger program bets are made, especially in hot areas of research or programs where there are large integration costs.
    - rmah 5y ago
      A $50mil budget for a applied research project seems pretty low to me, especially when split up between multiple orgs.
- goodcjw2 5y ago
  $3~4B is indeed quite big budget. However, it's dwarfed by big tech's R&D budget. FB alone spends $20B+ each year. I guess one key difference is that unlike FB, DARPA money doesn't need to be confined to make quick and visible returns, thus they can focus on more long term problems. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/research-development-expenses https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/resear...
  - rektide 5y ago
    The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider & The Revolution that Made Computing Personal, by Michael Waldrop[1], is one of the books out there that touches upon the early days of ARPA, what happened, and how computing & networking was jump started under by a far-seeing thrown-into-position bureaucrat who both dreamed big personally but more so, stood back & gave multiple far seeing groups of techies free reign to bring their dreams to life. A lot of other books I've read also speak similar stories, and I tend to believe them. It's a near & dear book to me (although due for a re-read at this point), & I think many others. A history of many of the ideas circulating, and how many overlapped & reinforced on the way to building what ended up being the internet. There's more internet-centric accounts like Where Wizards Stay Up Late or Dealers of Lightning, but Dream Machines remains the favorite of many[2]. I just cant emphasize enough how much benefit I think there is to government granting good hard working big idea people, with not a lot of oversight or expectations. The counter though, is that these were relatively small organizations, all in all, and the goal is not to create jobs for life (as I feel like most other research institutions tend to do) but to fund projects, ideas, for a duration, and then move on, re-allocate funds. [1] https://www.wired.com/2001/10/the-dream-machine-j-c-r-licklider-and-the-revolution-that-made-computing-personal-by-m-mitchell-waldrop/ https://www.wired.com/2001/10/the-dream-machine-j-c-r-lickli... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14119220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14119220
  - Esras 5y ago
    The kind of R&D that DARPA is doing and the kind of R&D that Facebook is reporting in their yearly report are very, _very_ different numbers. Every single tech company reports ongoing development work as "R&D," whereas much of the work that DARPA or other national labs do is exploratory and towards a lot of different projects. For instance, at every company I've worked at, all of the infrastructure is under the R&D budget.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  In a ha-ha-only-serious way, I think this is a big part of the answer. DARPA is the only US funder that’s willing to pay for experienced staff. If your proposal needs a half-dozen seasoned scientists or engineers, they’ll pay for it. In contrast, the NIH and NSF are very trainee-focused: a typical project consists of one professor loosely overseeing 1-3 “trainees”. We obviously need future scientists, but this model has a ton of drawbacks in terms of speed, quality, and even the nature of the project (which needs to let three people be somewhat-separately “evaluated”). It has also no room in it for any ICs more than four or five years post-PhD, which is bonkers given what the same organizations just paid to train them!
- xallarap 5y ago
  Start with an ibm 7090 and pong. Hurry.
fumblebee 5y ago
https://outline.com/Pdqc5L https://outline.com/Pdqc5L
- godelmachine 5y ago
  I make it a point to thank people who post links that bypass paywall, so thanks :)
pedalpete 5y ago
Australia has CSIRO (I'm a former employee), which is not quite the same but has had some big successes such as WiFi, seL4. From being on the inside for a short period of time, I've had a glimpse at just how hard this is. Projects come and go, getting killed for budgets, politics, etc etc The commitment and early vision, are very difficult to re-create. I'm most familiar with WiFi as I worked with one of the inventors. It was patented in 1992 based on research in radio-telescopes for detecting black holes, which had been done years earlier. If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it. Most computers were desktops, you didn't take a laptop to get a latte (which was also just barely a common beverage). Most people didn't have the internet, so there wasn't much to connect to. Your computer didn't move, so why have it wireless. Mostly you'd connect to a printer, which was also huge, so may as well be wired. There was nothing you would do on the network which would use the speed that WiFi was capable of. It would be almost a decade before it would be somewhat useful, and not until 2008, with the arrival of smartphones that it was a necessity. So yes, I believe most countries should try to support a DARPA like environment. I don't believe most countries will be successful in their attempt.
- ioseph 5y ago
  I feel there is an enormous difference between DARPA and CSIRO primary the "D". How many incredible innovations has DARPA made that will never reach the public because they give a strategic advantage?
  - pedalpete 5y ago
    Agreed, but in the context of governments hoping to clone DARPA success, it's more about the innovations than the "D" part.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), established in 1958, is an agency within the Department of Defense (DOD) responsible for catalyzing the development of technologies that maintain and advance the capabilities and technical superiority of the U.S. military." [1] [1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45088.pdf Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: Overview and Issues for Congress
howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
The US trade deficit & endless money printing is funding many of these countries' advanced projects. China in particular. 100 years from now whomever is left in this world with some semblance of free will and expression will look back on US self-hating/self-destructive political rhetoric and the policy it engendered, laughing and crying at the folly of it all.
- tangjurine 5y ago
  Are you saying the US is selflessly funding these projects for other countries?
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    No. The greed of the short-sighted wealthy is funding these projects at the expense of everyone else in the country.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      That's... a questionable claim to make. Walk me through how US deficit funding work to the detriment of US citizens and the benefit of the rest of the world?
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  So China develops technology and funds it by selling goods and labor to American businesses? Seems good to me.
  - bassman9000 5y ago
    Are there any examples of breakthrough technologies recently developed by the CCP that have benefited other than themselves? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breakthrough https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breakthrough
    - dv_dt 5y ago
BlackVanilla 5y ago
Relevant recent discussion: DARPA Awards Moderna a Grant for Up to $25M to Develop mRNA Therapeutics (2013) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269)
- ethbr0 5y ago
  mRNA technology will never go anywhere or develop anything useful. ;) This is a prime example of wasteful government spending, when a free market could have better allocated investment!
  - trynumber9 5y ago
    what an interesting take. traditional capital invested in Moderna's mRNA research too. https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-40-million-financing-advance-development-new https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
    - nafizh 5y ago
      I think it was sarcasm.
  - bassman9000 5y ago
    A bit unfair. This is not a public agency allocation to a publicly executed project. This is a private, for-profit enterprise with a public (_as in owned by the State_) customer. Vastly different incentives when the customer and the one executing are not the same.
    - bregma 5y ago
      OK. Insulin, then. Some academics got to play with puppy dogs and get paid by the public purse, then then went and donated their patents to a non-profit. What a waste!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
godelmachine 5y ago
Here’s an oft less spoken about institution which I believe more people should know - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Advanced_Research_Projects_Activity?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Advanced_Research...
wydfre 5y ago
Clone IARPA - I want more nation state AIs named “Cerberus” or something. My definition of the singularity is when machines understand people - I cannot wait.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/qCstS https://archive.is/qCstS
fouc 5y ago
> First, whatever the hell DARPA is, it is not a demand-side approach to innovation policy, which the OECD defines as things like public procurement, regulations, standards and consumer policies. Second, demand-side, by definition, is pretty much the opposite of mission-driven. Third, DARPA has never had scale-up and commercialization of research as a mission. And fourth, DARPA, to the extent it ever worked, worked because it had a relatively narrow mission, not a grab-bag like “agri-food, clean-tech and digital services”. https://higheredstrategy.com/a-very-canadian-innovation-proposal/ https://higheredstrategy.com/a-very-canadian-innovation-prop...
- mattkrause 5y ago
  I don’t think that’s right about DARPA and commercialization. I worked on a few programs and commercialization came up regularly. The PMs wanted to know your plans for regulatory testing/approval, if you had met with the relevant agencies, were you filing patents, etc. This literally started at the day 1, the proposers’ day, and the end goal was very clearly to have an off-the-shelf option that the DoD could buy en masse. They have other organizations, like In-Q-Tel that are also clearly meant to push this along.
jjk166 5y ago
Of all the potential headlines that include the words "DARPA", "growing", and "clone" this is potentially the least exciting.
lnsru 5y ago
Meanwhile Germany created this bureaucratic monstrosity: https://www.sprind.org/en/ https://www.sprind.org/en/ Their offer is really hard to understand. As a founder I want DARPA alike grant, but I guess, this organization will not give me one. Other sources claim, that this agency supports idea with up to €200k. That’s a laugh number compared to DARPA. As a taxpayer I just have a feeling about tons of money wasted in this funny political project.
divan 5y ago
To obligatory long-reads for anyone interested in DARPA model - Why does DARPA work? - https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw - A private ARPA user manual - https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa

113 points by edward 5y ago

Just start with a big BIG pile of cash and work back from there. https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/budget https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/budget

chc4 5y ago
3.5 billion for every DARPA project is a hilariously low number. DARPA projects are famous for having low budgets, completing under budget, and completing under time. It has an extremely worthwhile return on investment.
- pedalpete 5y ago
  I'd be keen to see a source on this if you have one.
- Donald 5y ago
  No US government research project aims to be under budget. Money is viewed as a finite expiring resource and there's every incentive to avoid your contractors from returning ceiling to the government. I would not consider DARPA work to be low budget. DARPA programs are very typically in the $50 million range and program resources are split up between multiple performers. Sometimes larger program bets are made, especially in hot areas of research or programs where there are large integration costs.
  - rmah 5y ago
    A $50mil budget for a applied research project seems pretty low to me, especially when split up between multiple orgs.
goodcjw2 5y ago
$3~4B is indeed quite big budget. However, it's dwarfed by big tech's R&D budget. FB alone spends $20B+ each year. I guess one key difference is that unlike FB, DARPA money doesn't need to be confined to make quick and visible returns, thus they can focus on more long term problems. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/research-development-expenses https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/resear...
- rektide 5y ago
  The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider & The Revolution that Made Computing Personal, by Michael Waldrop[1], is one of the books out there that touches upon the early days of ARPA, what happened, and how computing & networking was jump started under by a far-seeing thrown-into-position bureaucrat who both dreamed big personally but more so, stood back & gave multiple far seeing groups of techies free reign to bring their dreams to life. A lot of other books I've read also speak similar stories, and I tend to believe them. It's a near & dear book to me (although due for a re-read at this point), & I think many others. A history of many of the ideas circulating, and how many overlapped & reinforced on the way to building what ended up being the internet. There's more internet-centric accounts like Where Wizards Stay Up Late or Dealers of Lightning, but Dream Machines remains the favorite of many[2]. I just cant emphasize enough how much benefit I think there is to government granting good hard working big idea people, with not a lot of oversight or expectations. The counter though, is that these were relatively small organizations, all in all, and the goal is not to create jobs for life (as I feel like most other research institutions tend to do) but to fund projects, ideas, for a duration, and then move on, re-allocate funds. [1] https://www.wired.com/2001/10/the-dream-machine-j-c-r-licklider-and-the-revolution-that-made-computing-personal-by-m-mitchell-waldrop/ https://www.wired.com/2001/10/the-dream-machine-j-c-r-lickli... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14119220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14119220
- Esras 5y ago
  The kind of R&D that DARPA is doing and the kind of R&D that Facebook is reporting in their yearly report are very, _very_ different numbers. Every single tech company reports ongoing development work as "R&D," whereas much of the work that DARPA or other national labs do is exploratory and towards a lot of different projects. For instance, at every company I've worked at, all of the infrastructure is under the R&D budget.
mattkrause 5y ago
In a ha-ha-only-serious way, I think this is a big part of the answer. DARPA is the only US funder that’s willing to pay for experienced staff. If your proposal needs a half-dozen seasoned scientists or engineers, they’ll pay for it. In contrast, the NIH and NSF are very trainee-focused: a typical project consists of one professor loosely overseeing 1-3 “trainees”. We obviously need future scientists, but this model has a ton of drawbacks in terms of speed, quality, and even the nature of the project (which needs to let three people be somewhat-separately “evaluated”). It has also no room in it for any ICs more than four or five years post-PhD, which is bonkers given what the same organizations just paid to train them!
xallarap 5y ago
Start with an ibm 7090 and pong. Hurry.

fumblebee 5y ago

https://outline.com/Pdqc5L https://outline.com/Pdqc5L

godelmachine 5y ago
I make it a point to thank people who post links that bypass paywall, so thanks :)

pedalpete 5y ago

Australia has CSIRO (I'm a former employee), which is not quite the same but has had some big successes such as WiFi, seL4. From being on the inside for a short period of time, I've had a glimpse at just how hard this is. Projects come and go, getting killed for budgets, politics, etc etc The commitment and early vision, are very difficult to re-create. I'm most familiar with WiFi as I worked with one of the inventors. It was patented in 1992 based on research in radio-telescopes for detecting black holes, which had been done years earlier. If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it. Most computers were desktops, you didn't take a laptop to get a latte (which was also just barely a common beverage). Most people didn't have the internet, so there wasn't much to connect to. Your computer didn't move, so why have it wireless. Mostly you'd connect to a printer, which was also huge, so may as well be wired. There was nothing you would do on the network which would use the speed that WiFi was capable of. It would be almost a decade before it would be somewhat useful, and not until 2008, with the arrival of smartphones that it was a necessity. So yes, I believe most countries should try to support a DARPA like environment. I don't believe most countries will be successful in their attempt.

ioseph 5y ago
I feel there is an enormous difference between DARPA and CSIRO primary the "D". How many incredible innovations has DARPA made that will never reach the public because they give a strategic advantage?
- pedalpete 5y ago
  Agreed, but in the context of governments hoping to clone DARPA success, it's more about the innovations than the "D" part.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), established in 1958, is an agency within the Department of Defense (DOD) responsible for catalyzing the development of technologies that maintain and advance the capabilities and technical superiority of the U.S. military." [1] [1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45088.pdf Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: Overview and Issues for Congress

howmayiannoyyou 5y ago

The US trade deficit & endless money printing is funding many of these countries' advanced projects. China in particular. 100 years from now whomever is left in this world with some semblance of free will and expression will look back on US self-hating/self-destructive political rhetoric and the policy it engendered, laughing and crying at the folly of it all.

tangjurine 5y ago
Are you saying the US is selflessly funding these projects for other countries?
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  No. The greed of the short-sighted wealthy is funding these projects at the expense of everyone else in the country.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    That's... a questionable claim to make. Walk me through how US deficit funding work to the detriment of US citizens and the benefit of the rest of the world?
TchoBeer 5y ago
So China develops technology and funds it by selling goods and labor to American businesses? Seems good to me.
- bassman9000 5y ago
  Are there any examples of breakthrough technologies recently developed by the CCP that have benefited other than themselves? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breakthrough https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breakthrough
  - dv_dt 5y ago

BlackVanilla 5y ago

Relevant recent discussion: DARPA Awards Moderna a Grant for Up to $25M to Develop mRNA Therapeutics (2013) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269)

ethbr0 5y ago
mRNA technology will never go anywhere or develop anything useful. ;) This is a prime example of wasteful government spending, when a free market could have better allocated investment!
- trynumber9 5y ago
  what an interesting take. traditional capital invested in Moderna's mRNA research too. https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-40-million-financing-advance-development-new https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
  - nafizh 5y ago
    I think it was sarcasm.
- bassman9000 5y ago
  A bit unfair. This is not a public agency allocation to a publicly executed project. This is a private, for-profit enterprise with a public (_as in owned by the State_) customer. Vastly different incentives when the customer and the one executing are not the same.
  - bregma 5y ago
    OK. Insulin, then. Some academics got to play with puppy dogs and get paid by the public purse, then then went and donated their patents to a non-profit. What a waste!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

godelmachine 5y ago

Here’s an oft less spoken about institution which I believe more people should know - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Advanced_Research_Projects_Activity?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Advanced_Research...

wydfre 5y ago

Clone IARPA - I want more nation state AIs named “Cerberus” or something. My definition of the singularity is when machines understand people - I cannot wait.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/qCstS https://archive.is/qCstS

fouc 5y ago

> First, whatever the hell DARPA is, it is not a demand-side approach to innovation policy, which the OECD defines as things like public procurement, regulations, standards and consumer policies. Second, demand-side, by definition, is pretty much the opposite of mission-driven. Third, DARPA has never had scale-up and commercialization of research as a mission. And fourth, DARPA, to the extent it ever worked, worked because it had a relatively narrow mission, not a grab-bag like “agri-food, clean-tech and digital services”. https://higheredstrategy.com/a-very-canadian-innovation-proposal/ https://higheredstrategy.com/a-very-canadian-innovation-prop...

mattkrause 5y ago
I don’t think that’s right about DARPA and commercialization. I worked on a few programs and commercialization came up regularly. The PMs wanted to know your plans for regulatory testing/approval, if you had met with the relevant agencies, were you filing patents, etc. This literally started at the day 1, the proposers’ day, and the end goal was very clearly to have an off-the-shelf option that the DoD could buy en masse. They have other organizations, like In-Q-Tel that are also clearly meant to push this along.

jjk166 5y ago

Of all the potential headlines that include the words "DARPA", "growing", and "clone" this is potentially the least exciting.

lnsru 5y ago

Meanwhile Germany created this bureaucratic monstrosity: https://www.sprind.org/en/ https://www.sprind.org/en/ Their offer is really hard to understand. As a founder I want DARPA alike grant, but I guess, this organization will not give me one. Other sources claim, that this agency supports idea with up to €200k. That’s a laugh number compared to DARPA. As a taxpayer I just have a feeling about tons of money wasted in this funny political project.

divan 5y ago

To obligatory long-reads for anyone interested in DARPA model - Why does DARPA work? - https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw - A private ARPA user manual - https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa