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Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs
- eries 3y agoAs some of you probably know, I spent a number of years working with GE, which included plenty of time at the legendary GE Research lab in Niskayuna. So it was a special thrill to see this piece connecting Answer.AI to the long history of R&D labs. Our ideas about R&D are kind of out of fashion in our current age, but I hope this says more about the age than it does about the quality of the ideas. Happy to answer questions in this thread, if there are any fellow R&D-lab-enjoyers here.
- growingkittens 3y agoWhat was an average workday like?
- eries 3y agoWell, considering we only just started, we haven't encountered any average workdays yet. I still hold out hope, though, that one day we will.
- growingkittens 3y agoSorry - I meant a workday at the GE Research lab you mentioned.
- riemannzeta 3y agoI'm not sure who's better positioned to answer, you or Jeremy and I asked him already: How are you thinking about the role of patenting at Answer.AI? How about handling tech transfer issues with universities?
- eries 3y agoI've never been a big fan of patents as they've historically applied to software. But this is a public policy issue, not something an individual company can fix. So I've always been content to follow patent best practices, even when they aren't the most logical. In terms of tech transfer, Jeremy has quite a bit of experience with collaborating with the best academic labs, especially in machine learning, so I expect we will do a lot of that kind of partnering.
- riemannzeta 3y agoMakes sense. We have to work within the system as we find it. Would be great to see the system evolve in a way that would support efforts like yours though!
- datadrivenangel 3y agoSo what are some of the early projects you'll explore? Appreciate your writing by the way!
- eries 3y agothank you! nothing specific to announce yet, but I'm pretty excited about the preliminary research results from just our first few weeks of operation
- systems_glitch 3y agoDrove Erie Boulevard and survived to tell the tale.
- jph00 3y agoJeremy from Answer.AI here -- Answer.AI is, to some extent, the subject of this article. Perhaps worth noting here that we didn't pay the author, Eric Gilliam; it's his independent analysis based on years of study of 19th & 20th century R&D labs. I'm hoping that not only will Answer.AI be successful, but that Eric's words in the conclusion will come to pass: > "If their USD10 million experiment works, it has the chance to spark a rush of emboldened researchers and engineers to found small research firms, leveraging the models of the once-great dragons of American industrial R&D." I'm happy to answer any questions you have about our experiment, and my co-founder Eric Ries (@eries) is around too. (Note that there are 2 Erics mentioned here -- that can get confusing!) By way of background, Eric Ries is the creator of the "Lean Startup", coined the term "Minimal Viable Product", and created the Long Term Stock Exchange, and I'm the co-founder of fast.ai, Enlitic, Kaggle, FastMail, and Optimal Decisions Group.
- tikkun 3y agoAwesome! What sorts of products is your lab working on?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jph00 3y agoCurrently we're working on low-resource fine-tuning research (i.e. train larger models on smaller cheaper GPUs), and looking into applications in the education and legal spaces. We're also starting to look at intersections between long-tail image recognition and language models.
- tikkun 3y agoCool - thanks for answering!
- a_petrov 3y agoYesterday I had the thought of what we could achieve right now with let's say 3 x A2000 leftover GPUs from a random second-hand crypto mining rig. I think it would be awesome to be able to use GPUs from second-hand crypto mining rigs for cheaper fine-tuning research. Good luck! As an enthusiast who loves The Lean Startup and who recently started playing around with LLMs, I'm super stoked about Answer.AI
- nickdothutton 3y ago“At first sight, when one comes upon it in its surprisingly rural setting, the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ main New Jersey site looks like a large and up-to-date factory, which in a sense it is. But it is a factory for ideas, and so its production lines are invisible.” — Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer, in his 1958 book, Voice Across the Sea.
- eries 3y agoPrescient, really. Almost all of us knowledge workers today work in factories where the production lines are invisible. It's why we struggle so much with concepts (like work-in-progres inventory or product development flow) that are relatively easy to understand when there is a physical factory to look at.
- publicdaniel 3y ago@Jeremy, have you ever encountered Ken Stanley’s book “Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective”? If you’re not familiar with him, he was the guy that invented the NEAT algorithm, Novelty Search, etc. In his book he talks about stepping stones and following what’s “interesting” to individuals. It seems like Answer.AI is focused on applied engineering, but any thoughts on this type of approach from a Research perspective?
- gradschoolfail 3y agoThis is funnily relevant because as far as I understand Ken is or was a research manager at OpenAI, and as outlined in the article, Answer.AI is trying not to be OpenAI.
- jph00 3y agoI should caveat this by saying I've only read summaries of the book, not the book itself. My understanding of it is that they view setting ambitious objectives as potentially limiting progress, and instead promote shorter-term novelty-seeking approaches. This is certainly how we do things at Answer.AI -- we hire people that are passionate tinkerers, and encourage a playful and spontaneous approach. That doesn't mean there's no coordination or long-term goal, but rather that we view these short-term approaches as being a good way to make progress.
- gradschoolfail 3y agoThanks! That nicely dovetails with my understnding. BTW, the two case studies at the end of the book I found to be helpful in analyzing the main ideas!
- egillia3 3y agoHey! It’s Eric (the author). To the author of this comment, I’d say that the use of “long leash within a narrow fence” (which directed Langmuir’s work) or “circumscribed freedom” (which directed much Bell work) is generally compatible with researcher interests. As I talk about in the article, Langmuir was able to pick from a bunch of problems in his wheelhouse…there were just conditions. And those conditions meant whatever area he picked might come with a high willingness to spend from GE! And if his work yielded results GE would have a way to quickly deploy the knowledge. All of which is great. To put his work in a box with what the Coolidge-types did is probably unfair. He was following curiosity under constraints, that’s all. That is not to say all basic research roles in the world should look like that. But it makes sense given most basic researchers don’t fully understand which of all the problems they could happily pursue are actually most useful to industry. MIT professors of the early 1900s used to source research problems somewhat similarly. Hopefully all of that helps a bit!
- 8en 3y agoWhat service was used to create the Ai voice? It's one of the first I've heard that sounds pleasant and life like.
- eries 3y agoI believe it was done with OpenAI TTS
- Yenrabbit 3y agoYup, I just used the default demo of their TTS to convert the article one chunk at a time so I could listen while I swapped some RAM around. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-to-speech https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-to-speech
- lokimedes 3y agoThe best of luck to you guys, and excellent article by Eric. I recently came across his freaktales.com site, and was delighted to find another fan of the bygone age of R&D. We also just launched Unbelievable Labs (unbelievablelabs.com), with the ambition to combine Physics-oriented venture building with applied research. It would be great to form a network of these to emulate some of the scale that Bell Labs had due to monopoly funding.
- Animats 3y agoThe classic on the early electrical manufacturers is "The electrical manufacturers 1875-1900".[1] This is the Harvard Business School take on Edison. The business plan for his first power plant is in there. (He way underestimated the payback period, but it was only a few years, so it worked out.) There's also "Men and Volts"[2], a history of the early days of General Electric. Which, I think, is where this article got their info on tungsten. The big corporate labs were part of far larger manufacturing companies. It's not clear that a standalone lab can function in the same way. [1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.4159/harvard.9780674423640/html https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.4159/harvard.97806... [2] https://archive.org/details/menandvoltsstory00hammrich https://archive.org/details/menandvoltsstory00hammrich
- egillia3 3y agoHey it’s Eric (the author). I talk quite a bit in the article about how to make the lessons of places like Bell and GE work even if you’re not attached to a large lab. Repurposing Bell-style systems engineers to isolate white hot problems is one example. Another is the general BBN-style approach which worked for them as a stand-alone R&D firm. I have stand alone pieces where I explore both of those quite a bit. In general, I don’t think the concept of the playbooks of the great industrial R&D labs not working in firms un-attached to large firms holds much water.
- fuzzfactor 3y agoExcellent article. I'm going to have to look at some of your other material. Experimentation is different than other research or engineering but I think anything that amounts to a "system" can benefit from a systems problem solver who can perform as needed across the whole system. Any organization is fortunate to have a person who can go without routine or typical workdays and do this. It does seem like the bigger companies which have the most clearly defined roles can eventually get by on momentum without having anyone at all in a creative problem-solving position. OTOH a small outfit can deploy unique problem-solving ability using only a handful of people that many corporations have none of. So the "very, very best people" may be what can get the momentum going to begin with given the right opportunity.
- jiyunakenkyusha 3y agoI am a researcher working in an industrial research lab who is in the process of changing careers (with research being more of a hobby rather than something that’s subject to performance reviews) due to my disagreements with the short-term focus of upper management and the constant pressure to “deliver value” on a regular basis. This post from Answer.ai was quite timely for me, and I am rooting for the lab to succeed! We need more research institutions that are free from either short-term business demands or the “publish or perish” system of academic research. Such freedom will encourage more ambitious, riskier research that could potentially have a greater payoff for our field and for society in general. I hope that Answer.ai will prove to be a successful model that balances business concerns with the risk-taking and exploration that comes with great research. If Answer.ai is successful, this will give me hope in the future of long-term research.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> Legally, Answer.AI is a company. But in practice, it might hover somewhere between a lab and a normal “profit-maximizing firm” — as was the case with Edison’s lab. The founders seem perfectly content to pursue high-risk projects that might lead to failures or lack of revenue for quite a while. In saying this, I do not mean to imply they are content to light money on fire doing research with no chance of a return. Rather, they hope to fund a body of research projects that ideally have positive ROI in the long term. They are just not overly concerned with short-term revenue creation. This may be the biggest weakness. One things the greatest R&D labs had was a big cash cow that paid the bills. Bell Labs was funded by AT&T’s massive phone monopoly. PARC was funded by Xerox’ massive business. Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks were paid by massive DoD contracts.
- Yenrabbit 3y agoOne benefit answer.ai has over some of those labs is that it's building software, so expenses are mostly just salaries and GPU time - no need for massive capex on fabrication equipment or anything like that. And since we're focused on efficient fine-tuning and inference rather than foundation model training, even the GPU spend is likely to be extremely modest compared to some other players :)
- Mistletoe 3y agoThe name is bad and the name is everything in tech. I thought it was some answers.com AI spinoff. This is far too generic and a google search of it is a nightmare. You don't buy your books on books.com, you buy them on amazon.com, you don't buy your pet supplies on pets.com, you buy them on chewy.com.
- scottkrager 3y agopets.com is owned and redirected to PetSmart, sort of proves your point but sort of not.
- class3shock 3y agoThis makes me nostalgic for something that I never had and doesn't seem to exist anymore, labs unburdened by either the red tape of government or academia, or alternately, the pressure for results and profits that many startups seem to slaved to. Is there a 21st century equivalent of Bell Labs out there somewhere? Asking for a friend.
- linguae 3y agoI believe Microsoft Research is the closest thing to the old Bell Labs or the old Xerox PARC that exists today, but I’ve heard that even MSR has changed (though this is just hearsay). I’ve heard historically researchers at MSR had a wide degree of freedom, and there has been many interesting projects coming out of there, my favorites being Singularity and Midori. Once again I don’t know how free the lab culture is, and I also don’t know the lab’s performance review criteria. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/
- iamsanteri 3y agoI’ve been reading lots of history books and interesting narratives. It seems like some sort of result-oriented pressure or a resource-based constraint has nearly always been the case with R&D and inventions. If Bell Labs is about laid back experimentation, I guess it’s more of an exception that proves the rule in these things. Even Google tends to feel the pressure of interest rates going up and lots of the more laid back stuff being thrown off as ”zero interest rate phenomenon” moonshot bets.
- riemannzeta 3y agoEric's depiction of Edison and his rapid experimentation sounds very similar to the descriptions of one of Edison's contemporaries, Luther Burbank, as told in The Garden of Invention by Jane S. Smith. I recommend this book to the author (if he hasn't already read it himself) as I do to anybody else who enjoyed his essay. There's a lot to be said for just exploring the combinatorial space of possibility in even a naive or brute force manner.
- moorerita 3y ago[dead]