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It would require Ma Bell. As the article correctly deduces (IMO), it was related to their quasi-monopoly. It was a partial and insecure monopoly; they did nee
by retrac 2y ago
It would require Ma Bell. As the article correctly deduces (IMO), it was related to their quasi-monopoly. It was a partial and insecure monopoly; they did need to innovate or they would eventually be eaten. Telecoms was their business, in the very broadest sense. New ways of drawing wire more efficiently would benefit their bottom line. New forms of amplifier technology would almost certainly benefit them ten or twenty years down the line. Same with a new kind of treatment to make telephone poles last longer. So basic metallurgy, forestry, and cutting-edge semiconductor physics were all within the remit. In hindsight it's almost like a public/national research laboratory, that happened to be privately held.
- foobarian 2y agoGoogle or Microsoft are pretty close nowadays. Look at all the infrastructure both of these sponsored over the years. It may not be as foundational as what BL did, but then again there is not as much low hanging fruit today either.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoAlso Google and Microsoft for the most part are not even trying to be innovative. Rather they try to milk out every last cent of existing products, driving people to buy their cloud services, or directly or indirectly sell user data to third parties.
- fragmede 2y agoself driving cars and transformers not good enough for you?
- bobmcnamara 2y agoNot when hipsters in my town strand them with a sack of flour.
- beezlewax 2y agoWhat self driving cars? None of them are up to the task from what I've seen.
- NullHypothesist 2y agoWaymo's got an open-to-public service in SF & Phoenix. Testing in LA & Austin now. It works really well, and has been expanding quickly (relatively speaking). https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/travel/self-driving-cars-san-francisco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/travel/self-driving-cars-...
- nox101 2y agoYou're saying Google's long work in AI, Quantum Computing, etc... are not trying to be innovative? Their researchers certainly put out a lot of influential papers. https://research.google/ https://research.google/
- abadpoli 2y agoThere is an insane amount of innovation happening at Google and Microsoft et al. The amount of investment going into efforts like making data centers more power efficient, making better cooling systems, reducing latency or using fiber more efficiently etc is incredible and rivals the work done at Bell Labs back in the day. You just don’t hear about it because these private companies have no incentive to share it. And that’s entirely separate from the fact that Generative AI wouldn’t even be a thing if not for the research that Google published.
- buildbot 2y agoLiterally just watched an internal talk about this topic at work (Microsoft). Lots of cool internal research to make things better in every domain, but as you said, it won't be shared that much. The Open Compute Project is great though, and MSR does awesome research across many domains too, as does Alphabet.
- count 2y agoWas the Bell Labs Systems Journal shared outside of Bell Labs contemporaneously? I have original copies of the Unix issue, for example, but have no idea if that was 'generally available' back when it came out...
- ghaff 2y agoWithout deeply researching the topic, my understanding is that Bell Labs didn't really "open source" everything or really most things. Just look at the later law suit over Unix.
- gregw2 2y agoSee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix : "Due to a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, the Bell System was forbidden from entering any business other than "common carrier communications services", and was required to license any patents it had upon request. Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Bell Labs instead shipped the system for the cost of media and shipping. ... In 1983, the U.S. Department of Justice settled its second antitrust case against AT&T, causing the breakup of the Bell System. This relieved AT&T of the 1956 consent decree that had prevented the company from commercializing Unix. AT&T promptly introduced Unix System V into the market. The newly created competition nearly destroyed the long-term viability of Unix, because it stifled the free exchanging of source code and led to fragmentation and incompatibility. The GNU Project was founded in the same year by Richard Stallman."
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> not even trying to be innovative it was Google's research that led to the current LLM revolution
- xtracto 2y agoSomeone from The Valley told me a couple (~8) of years ago that he didn't like the way SV startup culture had transformed. He argued that in the past, the culture of startups in the valley focused on innovation and disruption. VCs would fund moonshots and small teams doing crazy bew thing. But nowadays, the valley looks more for "scalability' projects, things that will sell to millions of people. He blamed the cost of living/hiring in the area. He mentioned that with a lower cost of wages and living. A pre-seed startup could go a long way with family money funding the moonshot. I think it's sad that as you said even companies with large chunks of money aren't willing to spend in r&d as much as before. I guess a war is needed for that unfortunately.
- throwaway81523 2y agoMa Bell was regulated and they used the labs partly as a slush fund to smooth out their apparent earnings. When they got a rate increase, the labs would be well funded for a while, so AT&T wouldn't have to show an unseemly spike in profits. When they went for a long while without an increase, the labs would run lean until the next increase came. At least that's what someone told me back then.
- tedunangst 2y agoI've read more than one history of bell labs and never heard about this dynamic.
- flenserboy 2y agoTax law would also have to change: https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-credit-and-deducting-rd-expenditures/#:~:text=Under%20I.R.C.,currently%20deduct%20their%20R%26D%20expenses https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-cre....
- mullingitover 2y agoWinner winner chicken dinner. I think, ironically, the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017" has gutted tech jobs and R&D in a profound way. > The TCJA amended I.R.C. §174 such that, beginning in 2022, firms that invest in R&D are no longer able to currently deduct their R&D expenses. Rather, they must amortize their costs over five years, starting with the midpoint of the taxable year in which the expense is paid or incurred. For costs attributable to research conducted outside the U.S., such costs must be amortized over 15 years. This will be the first time since 1954 that companies will have to amortize their R&D costs, rather than immediately deduct those expenses. The act actually took us back by many decades in terms of R&D incentives, and devastated US competitiveness vs China by disincentivizing R&D across the board.
- nkozyra 2y agoRather than a monopoly, I'd say it takes 2 things (that are often present in monopolies): 1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no immediate threat from competition #2 drives a lot of the desire to innovate, the hope being that by the time competition catches up, you've got so much new stuff that they're back where they started. The closest thing I can think of in the tech space now is Apple with consumer hardware moat. The other big players are still cannibalizing and copying each other's business segments.
- trelane 2y agoYou are forgetting a vital element: the C-suite must want to plow the money into research instead of lining their yachts and various houses with it.
- bumby 2y agoSomewhat less cynical view, but maybe corporations were allowed to be more long term focused in the past?
- ElevenLathe 2y agoOr maybe they had to be, with interest and tax rates what they were?
- bumby 2y agoCould you elaborate or be more specific? Given how long BL existed, I’m not sure I can pin down what rates you’re talking about
- gregw2 2y agoOne of the commenters on the original article said "Bell Labs was funded through a 1% tax on Bell's overall revenue, as well as a claim on a portion of Western Electric's revenue, so yes, AT&T was able to recoup Bell Labs' expenses." This would protect it from (at least certain types of) C-suite predation presumably.
- YouWhy 2y agoThank you - that's a spot on answer. Bell Labs was the only way Ma Bell could stay relevant given that the rest of the world was making progress on their own.
- randomdata 2y agoPerhaps you mean the only way they could maintain their monopoly? Bell Labs was Bell's bargaining chip with the government to allow it maintain its market dominance. The government allowed, at least for a long time, the monopoly to persist so long as Bell Labs was acting as a public good. As part of that social contract, Bell was not allowed to capitalize on what Bell Labs produced. I expect Bell Labs is so notable because the public at large was able to take their discoveries and turn them into productive ventures, to which they did. That's not completely unheard of today – LLM-based businesses being a recent example that stem from Google opening up research to the public – but it is unusual for today's research labs to give away everything. Today, not even the research labs with that explicit intent (OpenAI) are willing to give away everything (or much of anything).
- JackFr 2y agoThe evidence pointing toward monopoly is IBM TJ Watson Research and Xerox Parc.
- threatripper 2y agoI wonder if we look back at Meta like this which pours ungodly amounts of Money into VR right now.
- disgruntledphd2 2y agoProbably, given that they've probably done more open research than anyone else (open compute, llama, basically all of the Big Data stuff came from papers by Google and code from Facebook). They're unlikely to be praised around here, but I think history will potentially be kinder to them.
- sudosays 2y agoThis makes me think of Meta's approach in open sourcing a lot of their AI efforts. I can't find the exact snippet from the Zuckerberg interview, but the reasoning was: If Meta open sources their models/tools and it gains wide adoption, ways will be found to run the models more efficiently or infrastructure/research built on top of Meta's work will ultimately end up saving them a lot of costs in future. Release the model that cost $10bn to make now, and save yourself billions when others build the tooling to run it at 1/10th the cost.
- blueboo 2y agoIt rings a bit false when juxtaposed with their $40b spend on the Metaverse…where was the savvy leveraging of the open source community then? Meanwhile Meta’s competitors commoditise and glean profits from actually-SOTA LLM offerings. In any case, their hypothesis is testable: which open source innovations from Llama1/2 informed Llama3?
- skinner927 2y agoThe leverage with the Metaverse was eventually users were supposed to create content which in turn makes the product better and brings more users.
- sudosays 2y ago> In any case, their hypothesis is testable: which open source innovations from Llama1/2 informed Llama3? I am not sure, but I agree that it is definitely testable. If I had to guess/answer, I would argue that the open source contributions to Pytorch have a downstream contribution to the performance, and maybe the preparation and release of the models required an amount of polish and QA that would otherwise not have been there.
- DonHopkins 2y agoIt would require The Phone Company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEiTxg21q8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEiTxg21q8
- jdougan 2y agoSuch a good movie.
- dreamcompiler 2y ago> In hindsight it's almost like a public/national research laboratory, that happened to be privately held. In more ways than one. Sandia National Laboratories (mentioned in the article) is a national research laboratory, and since it was managed by AT&T from its inception in 1948 it was organized like Bell Labs. It's no longer managed by AT&T and its culture today feels a lot less like Bell Labs, but in the early days the employees called it "Bell Labs West." Sandia is the only national lab that has an AT&T origin story.