as 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
These techniques are the key unlocks to robustifying AI and creating certifiable trust in their behavior.
Starting with pre-deep neural network era stuff like LQR-RRT trees, to the hot topic today of contraction theory, and control barrier certificates in autonomous vehicles
We always called this “monetizing the brand” and it’s been annoying me since at least when Sperry when private equity and the shoes stopped being multi-year daily drivers
This true - and git was not a moving target. AI core tech has certainly slowed down but still moving fast enough to make hard won lessons worthless and investing in learning them questionable.
After becoming familiar with the reality of the cost inflation of (in my case local government real estate) development projects vs private I chalked it up to graft, incentives, and mismanagement.
Actually your comment is probably more correct - adds a whole step to move the wallet. Misaligned incentives and mismanagement are probably more equal across public/private than we like to believe
I'm being a little bit facetious. When the government actually owns/operates the labor or equipment they can do a lot more. In the prison example state COs are certainly better than rent-a-cops.
It's just unfortunate that's how most administrators work. The traditional debate about public vs private usually focuses on different tradeoffs and incentives of the public - but if they are just paying market vendors it's greatly diminished.
I love this quote. mankind having been to space already, the rockets are the sideshow to the way they designed and grew an org that delivered them along with a great business, starting from an amount of capital loads of nobodies have had but failed to do anything interesting with.
It’s exceptional that people centrally organized a huge amount of effort and resources towards something imagined by countless humans since prehistory, was far from being a sure thing, had no possibility of revenue and only indirect value, planned and executed a full decade toward a single objective, and succeeded in a single moment shared by almost everyone with a television.
Arpanet, the transcontinental railroad, the pyramids…amazing still but lacked the 0 to 1 all at once factor. Starship is inspiring and also not a moonshot.
Hmm... Hadn't considered that. I suppose I was thinking of things in a "for it's time" lens. In general I suppose Starship is quite superior to the Apollo program. Apollo certainly feels more impressive to me, but I completely see how Starship is a greater achievement.
Given the circumstances and the relatively low dollars involved, it would be interesting to see the experiment: $10B darpa program
to establish a scalable fab ecosystem in 5 years via consortium.
This was how the internet was created, darpa stitched together dozens of performers to get the key ingredients (eg bbn gateways, academic subnets, experimental applications, protocol research.
They even led the last ditch marketing Hail Mary after years of no-one caring about the program besides the zillions of engineers from all around building it by organizing a press day in a hotel ballroom for a demo day.
As a taxpayer I’d strongly support 5B/.1% of the fed budget for a few years just to learn what happens in the attempt.
$5B wouldn’t be nearly enough to create a leading edge fab. Estimated cost for TSMC is $20B.
China has been trying and failing to build a competitive fab for years, has the rare earth minerals in its back yard, etc and can’t do it.
The second issue is, who exactly is going to use these fabs once they are built. One issue that Intel has is that its “customer service” sucks. TSMC will bend over backwards as a partner. No one wants to work with Intel.
Can you imagine Apple or Nvidia wanting to work with a government owned chip fab?
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