Sam Altman feels Silicon Valley has lost its innovation culture, saying great research hasn’t happened there in a ‘long time’::“Before OpenAI, what was the last really great scientific breakthrough that came out of a Silicon Valley company?” Altman said on a Wednesday podcast.
Corpos never provided any valuable research. They just take what publicly funded universities, institutes, and institutions publish and use that to build products then claim all the credits.
This is not exactly true but it mostly is. Check the transistor and laser for some counterexamples. The sampling theorem was also discovered at Bell Labs.
Bell labs was a real outlier.
It was funded by a regulated monopoly, with the government saying that a percentage of all profits had to go to R&D. They were not even allowed to give Unix to anyone other than universities, let alone profit of it.
Exactly. This is a detrimental difference. It was not an unregulated virulent profit mongering corporation.
These are all so old that I think it supports the point. A lot of today’s useful materials, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals were invented by corporations around that time, but in recent history, corporate labs have been gutted and cherry pick out of universities.
E.g. in recent history, AlexNet came out of utoronto, Google bought Alex’s startup shortly after, and then Google started developing deep learning models.
Exactly, what they do isn’t exactly research in most cases. It’s product development in kist cases. Big difference