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I feel like 30 years from now, many of today’s AI labs will be regarded with the same reverence as Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. They have a lot of the same ingredie
by rednafi 2y ago
I feel like 30 years from now, many of today’s AI labs will be regarded with the same reverence as Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. They have a lot of the same ingredients—backing from massive monopolies, virtually unlimited funding, and a wave of public interest in what they’re doing.
Sure, LLMs are impressive, but they don’t yet feel as foundational as Unix, transistors, GUIs, editors, or word processors. But give it a few decades, and who knows? In hindsight, we might look at OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepMind with the same awe we reserve for Bell Labs and PARC today.
- tomrod 2y agoMeh. We don't look at Yahoo or ebays attempts in the same way. Adtech was an interesting space but it turns out to have poor explanatory power for whether ads actually have an effect beyond basic notification (poor Coca Cola shareholders...). AI labs may be respected by insiders, but the raw engineering prowess of Bell labs, along with the joint basic and applied research initiatives, are "gone from our sight."
- rednafi 2y agoI agree. It’s kind of like how we always try to explain brain function in terms of whatever tech is trending at the time. In the same way, we’re biased to think the biggest hype lab today is gonna be the next Bell Labs. But that doesn’t mean it’ll actually turn out that way.
- timewizard 2y agoThere are more ways to not reach that goal that to reach it. I have strong doubts. Their scaling ideology does not seem to be generating the types of returns it should.