Comment by HarHarVeryFunny
2 years ago
I'm not sure how many, if any, are doing blue sky research (vs product-directed "research") any more the way that Bell Labs, IBM Watson and Xerox Parc used to do.
Look at what's going on with ML/AI - DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAIR now moved into a product group alongside Meta's GenAI group, Microsoft essentially outsourcing AI to OpenAI, OpenAI may as well call itself GPTCorp - a single-product commercial enterprise.
I guess it's not surprising given how short term the thinking is of today's publicly traded companies.
The reason Bell Telephone built that organization is that they had a government-sanctioned monopoly on local phone service, and to justify the continuation of this, they wanted to find ways to show they were contributing to society.
Could someone like Google or Microsoft build a Bell Labs today? Yes, almost certainly, but there's no financial incentive to do so. And the shareholders would not be pleased if you told them you were going to spend their money on something with no connection to the business.
A bigger question for the present is: why are the universities failing so badly? Their incentives have not changed, but we don't get the kind of innovative research we got out of Bell Labs. I don't know what the answer to that is.
Agreed. The role of monopoly profits in funding pure research almost can’t be overstated. Similarly, the geographic monopolies of newspapers (before the Internet) funded quality journalism.
"A bigger question for the present is: why are the universities failing so badly? Their incentives have not changed, but we don't get the kind of innovative research we got out of Bell Labs."
In my opinion, professors at research universities have to contend with the pressures of raising grant money in a competitive environment combined with "publish or perish" pressures. Even post-tenure there are ways universities could punish "non-productive" faculty members at institutions where professors are regularly expected to publish at top journals/conferences and raise grant money. It's not that much different from the pressure their corporate research counterparts face, where they have to regularly justify their employment by producing a regular flow of research results that have business impact. This pressure to produce results on a regular schedule, whether in industry or in academia, is something that I strongly believe stifles science and forces scientists to make evolutionary "sure bets" instead of working on riskier, more revolutionary projects like the ones that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC researchers got to work on during those labs' heydays.
Alan Kay, who worked at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, has a lot to say about supporting long-term, revolutionary research here (http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/).
In my opinion, the simple answer is that we need institutions that provide researchers the freedom and space to work on riskier, longer-term projects, and we also need funding to support such research.
For my personal career, I'm reminded of this quote from physicist J. J. Thomson made over a century ago:
"Granting the importance of this pioneering research, how can it best be promoted? The method of direct endowment will not work, for if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." (from https://archive.org/details/b29932208/page/198/mode/2up).
My career goal is to find a way to make a living outside of research that provides me enough time to do the research I want to do. This way I'm free from the pressures of either "publish or perish" from academia or "profit or perish" from industry.
Eh, I don't think today's scene is altogether that different from back then. In every case you have a research organization tied to an immensely profitable main enterprise. The vast majority of the work force works on the "product" side and only a small number of researchers are doing blue sky stuff.
This describes Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, as well as modern counterparts like MSR and DeepMind. As always, only a very small portion of the work force gets to do blue sky stuff - the rest have to do the "mundane" bits of making money.
Let's not be fooled by rose-tinted glasses here - even in its heyday Bell Labs was small fraction of the overall Bell operations, and likewise Xerox Parc an extremely prestigious but yet small slice of the overall enterprise.
> DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAI
I don’t really agree that training massive causal LMs is a “product focus”.
I agree that there is an increasing product focus in orgs like OAI, but a lot of that is coming from new growth rather than trading off with base research.
> I don’t really agree that training massive causal LMs is a “product focus”.
I'd hope that Google DeepMind's mission statement is a bit broader than that, but certainly Gemini seems to be the focus. It seems to me there's a world of difference between DeepMind's original goal of developing AGI (via whatever means - as a research objective), and now being told they have to build LLMs.
If we compare Google to Meta, it seems it used to be that DeepMind was equivalent to FAIR as a pure research organization, and Brain equivalent to Meta's product focused ML group(s), but now the joint Google DeepMind is more akin to Meta's GenAI group, and there is no unfettered research group at Google left free to pursue AGI in any way other than hoping it can be developed out of LLMs. However, FAIR also seems constrained now that they have been moved into a product-focused part of the organization (under CPO Chris Cox).
Did you work in this field? I just don’t find that a fair characterization. They are all still doing blue-sky research.
There is a ton of further research to be done in deep models. A lot of it will incorporate LLMs because that is currently the most powerful primitive you have. Research is a lot more closed now but I would not take that to mean research is no longer happening.
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This is not an accurate portayal of these labs. They're all still doing blue sky research.
Seems like we have ended up on the wrong side of the HN hivemind, reality be damned.
Well, if you're an insider at one of these companies, then please enlighten us!
What has changed from DeepMind as independent entity to Google DeepMind (following the hivemind LLM "path" to AGI ;) ) ?
What does it mean for FAIR to now be part of a product group ?
I'm sure the CEOs of these companies hope these changes are significant and will better align these research organizations with their corporate goals and marketplace opportunities ...
Is OpenAI pursuing AGI-directed research outside of LLMs, or is it now all hands on deck towards next GPT 5.0 product release ?
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