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These are the types that want academic freedom in a cut-throat industry setup and conversely never fit into academia because their profiles and growth ambitions
by blutoot 11mo ago
These are the types that want academic freedom in a cut-throat industry setup and conversely never fit into academia because their profiles and growth ambitions far exceed what an academic research lab can afford (barring some marquee names). It's an unfortunate paradox.
- sigbottle 11mo agoMaybe it's time for Bell Labs 2? I guess everyone is racing towards AGI in a few years or whatever so it's kind of impossible to cultivate that environment.
- belter 11mo ago> I guess everyone is racing towards AGI in a few years A pipe dream sustaining the biggest stock market bubble in history. Smart investors are jumping to the next bubble already...Quantum...
- re-thc 11mo ago> A pipe dream sustaining the biggest stock market bubble in history This is why we're losing innovation. Look at electric cars, batteries, solar panels, rare earths and many more. Bubble or struggle for survival? Right, because if US has no AI the world will have no AI? That's the real bubble - being stuck in an ancient world view. Meta's stock has already tanked for "over" investing in AI. Bubble, where?
- belter 11mo ago2 Trillion dollars in Capex to get code generators with hallucinations, that run at a loss, and you ask where is the Bubble?
- re-thc 11mo ago> 2 Trillion dollars in Capex to get code generators with hallucinations You assume that's the only use of it. And are people not using these code generators? Is this an issue with a lost generation that forgot what Capex is? We've moved from Capex to Opex and now the notion is lost, is it? You can hire an army of software developers but can't build hardware. Is it better when everyone buys DeepSeek or a non-US version? Well then you don't need to spend Capex but you won't have revenue either.
- littlestymaar 11mo agoDeepseek somehow didn't need $2T to happen.
- re-thc 11mo agoBecause you know how much they spent. And that $2T you're referring to includes infrastructure like energy, data centers, servers and many things. DeepSeek rents from others. Someone is paying.
- anotherd1p 11mo agoall that led up to Deepseek needed more. don't forget where it all comes from.
- matt3D 11mo agoI think the argument can be made that Deepseek is a state sponsored needle looking to pop another states bubble. If Deepseek is free it undermines the value of LLMs, so the value of these US companies is mainly speculation/FOMO over AGI.
- re-thc 11mo ago> the argument can be made that Deepseek is a state sponsored needle looking to pop another states bubble Who says they don't make money? Same with open source software that offer a hosted version. > If Deepseek is free it undermines the value of LLMs, so the value of these US companies is mainly speculation/FOMO over AGI Freemium, open source and other models all exist. Does it undermine the value of e.g. Salesforce?
- belter 11mo ago"Big Tech Needs $2 Trillion In AI Revenue By 2030 or They Wasted Their Capex" - https://www.wheresyoured.at/big-tech-2tr/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/big-tech-2tr/
- belter 11mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45902246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45902246
- ryukoposting 11mo agoThe Bell Labs we look back on was only the result of government intervention in the telecom monopoly. The 1956 consent decree forced Bell to license thousands of its patents, royalty free, to anyone who wanted to use them. Any patent not listed in the consent decree was to be licensed at "reasonable and nondiscriminatory rates." The US government basically forced AT&T to use revenue from its monopoly to do fundamental research for the public good. Could the government do the same thing to our modern megacorps? Absolutely! Will it? I doubt it. https://www.nytimes.com/1956/01/25/archives/att-settles-antitrust-case-shares-patents-us-hails-consent-decree.html https://www.nytimes.com/1956/01/25/archives/att-settles-anti...
- aatd86 11mo agoUsed to be a Google X. Not sure at what scale it was. But if any state/central bank was clever they would subsidize this. That's a better trickle down strategy. Until we get to agi and all new discoveries are autonomously led by AI that is :p
- williamDafoe 11mo agoGoogle X is a complete failure. Maybe they had fei-fei on staff for a short while but most of her work was done elsewhere.
- aatd86 11mo agoDidn't the current LLMs stem from this...? Or it might be Google Brain instead. For Google X, there is Waymo? I know a lot of stuff didn't pan out. This is expected. These were 'moonshots'. But the principle is there. I think that when a company sits on a load of cash, that's what they should do. Either that or become a kind of alternative investments allocator. These are risky bets. But they should be incentivized to take those risks. From a fiscal policy standpoint for instance. Well it probably is the case already via lower taxation of capital gains and so on. But there should probably exist a more streamlined framework to make sure incentives are aligned. And/or assigned government projects? Besides implementing their Cloud infrastructure that is...
- HarHarVeryFunny 11mo agoIt seems DeepMind is the closest thing to a well funded blue-sky AI research group, even despite the merger with Google Brain and now more of a product focus.
- blutoot 11mo ago[flagged]
- sllabres 11mo agoIf you are (obviously) interested in the matter you might find one of the Bell Labs articles discussed on HN: "Why Bell Labs Worked" [1] "The Influence of Bell Labs" [2] "Bringing back the golden days of Bell Labs" [3] "Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home" [4] or "Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle" [5] interesting too. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42275944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42275944 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32352584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32352584 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39077867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39077867 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3635489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3635489
- mysfi 11mo agoI became interested in the matter reading this thread and vaguely remember reading a couple of the articles. Saved them all in NotebookLM to get an audio overview and to read later. Thanks!
- anotherd1p 11mo agoI always take a bird's eye kind of view on things like that, because however close I get, it always loops around to make no sense. > is massively monopolistic and have unbounded discretionary research budget that is the case for most megacorps. if you look at all the financial instruments. modern monopolies are not equal to single corporation domination. modern monopolies are portfolios who do business using the same methods and strategies. the problem is that private interests strive mostly for control, not money or progress. if they have to spend a lot of money to stay in control of (their (share of the)) segments, they will do that, which is why stuff like the current graph of investments of, by and for AI companies and the industries works. A modern equivalent and "breadth" of a Bell Labs (et. al) kind of R&D speed could not be controlled and would 100% result in actual Artificial Intelligence vs all those white labelababbebel (sry) AI toys we get now. Post WW I and II "business psychology" have build a culture that cannot thrive in a free world (free as in undisturbed and left to all devices available) for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of elements with a medieval/dark-age kind of aggressive tendency to come to power and maintain it that way. In other words: not having a Bell Labs kind of setup anymore ensures that the variety of approaches taken on large scales aka industry-wide or systemic, remains narrow enough.
- gtech1 11mo agoThis sounds crazy. We don't even know/can't define what human intelligence is or how it works , but we're trying to replicate it with AGI ?
- Obscurity4340 11mo agoIf an LLM can pass a bar exam, isn't that at least a decent proof of concept or working model?
- anotherd1p 11mo agoI love this application of AI the most but as many have stated elsewhere: mathematical precision in law won't work, or rather, won't be tolerated.
- Obscurity4340 11mo agoDo you have an example that you rely on for that kind of statement?
- skeeter2020 11mo agoOr does this just prove lawyers are artificially intelligent? yes, a glib response, but think about it: we define an intelligence test for humans, which by definition is an artificial construct. If we then get a computer to do well on the test we haven't proved it's on par with human intelligence, just that both meet some of the markers that the test makers are using as rough proxies for human intelligence. Maybe this helps signal or judge if AI is a useful tool for specific problems, but it doesn't mean AGI
- staticman2 11mo agoI don't think the bar exam is scientifically designed to measure intelligence so that was an odd example. Citing the bar exam is like saying it passes the "Game of thrones trivia" exam so it must be intelligent. As for IQ tests and the like, to the extent they are "scientific" they are designed based on empirical observations of humans. It is not designed to measure the intelligence of a statistical system containing a compressed version of the internet.
- diego_sandoval 11mo agoThe fact that people invest on the architecture that keeps getting increasingly better results is a feature, not a bug. If LLMs actually hit a plateau, then investment will flow towards other architectures.
- esafak 11mo agoAt which point companies that had the foresight to investigate those architectures earlier on will have the lead.
- blueboo 11mo agoWe call it “legacy DeepMind”
- ambicapter 11mo agoWhy would Bell Labs be a good fit? It was famous for embedding engineers with the scientists to direct research in a more results-oriented fashion.
- musebox35 11mo agoGoogle Deepmind is the closest lab to that idea because Google is the only entity that is big enough to get close to the scale of AT&T. I was skeptical that the Deepmind and Google Brain merge would be successful but it seems to have worked surprisingly well. They are killing it with LLMs and image editing models. They are also backing the fastest growing cloud business in the world and collecting Nobel prizes along the way.
- ximeng 11mo agohttps://www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/ai-research/2025/sam-altmans-episteme-aims-to-reshape-science-rd/ https://www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/ai-research/2025/sam-altma... Like the new spin out Episteme from OpenAI?
- meekaaku 11mo agoI am of the opinion that splitting AT&T and hence Bell Labs was a net negative for America and rest of the world. We are yet to create lab as foundational as Bell Labs.
- red2awn 11mo agoI'd argue SSI and Thinking Machines Lab seem to that environment you are thinking about. Industry labs that focuses on research without immediate product requirement.
- inkysigma 11mo agoI don't think that quite matches because those labs have very clear directions of research in LLMs. The theming is a bit more constrained and I don't know if a line of research as vague as what LeCun is pursuing would be funded by those labs.
- stocksinsmocks 11mo agoI thought that was Google. Regulators pretend not to notice their monopoly, they probably get large government contracts for social engineering and surveillance laundered through advertising, and the “don’t be evil” part is they make some open source contributions
- kamaal 11mo agoMore importantly even if you do want it, and there are business situations that support your ambitions. You still have to do get into the managerial powerplay, which quite honestly takes a separate kind of skill set, time and effort. Which Im guessing the academia oriented people aren't willing to do. Its pretty much dog eat dog at top management positions. Its not exactly a space for free thinking timelines.
- ptero 11mo agoIt is not a free thinking paradise in academia either. Different groups fighting for hiring, promotions and influence exist there, too. And it tends to be more pronounced: it is much easier in industry to find a comparable job to escape a toxic environment, so a lot of problems in academia settings steam forever. But the skill sets to avoid and survive personnel issues in academia is different from industry. My 2c.
- anotherd1p 11mo ago> Its not exactly a space for free thinking timelines. Same goes for academia. People's visions compete for other people's financial budgets, time and other resources. Some dogs get to eat, study, train at the frontier and with top tools in top environments while the others hope to find a good enough shelter.
- whiplash451 11mo agoMeta has the financial oomph to run multiple Bell Labs within its organization. Why they decided not to do that is kind of a puzzle.
- keeganpoppen 11mo agobecause the business hierarchy clearly couldnt support it. take that for what you will.
- poslathian 11mo agoas I understand, Bell Labs mandate was to improve the network, which had tons of great threads to pull on: plastics for handsets, transistors for amplification, information theory for capacity on fixed copper. Google and Meta are ads businesses with a lot less surface area for such a mandate to have similar impact and, frankly, exciting projects people want to do. Meanwhile they still have tons of cash so, why not, throw money at solving Atari or other shiny programs. Also, for cultural reasons, there’s been a huge shift to expensive monolithic “moonshot programs” whose expenses need on-demand progress to justify and are simply slower and way less innovative. 3 passionate designers hiding deep inside Apple can side hustle up the key gestures that make multi touch baked enough to see a path to an iPhone - long before iPhone was any sort endgame direction they were being managed to. Innovation thrives on lots of small teams mostly failing in the search for something worth doubling down on. Googles et al have a new approach - aim for the moon, budget and staff for the moon, then burn cash while no one ever really polished up the fundamental enabling pieces in hindsight they needed to succeed