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Comment by optymizer

1 year ago

Drawing from own experience working with Harvard, MIT and Google researchers, I could not disagree more.

When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas?

You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at Xerox PARC. Yes, he was paid, but the main advantage was being given free reign to conduct research with the best experts in their fields, i.e. to invent and pursue ideas.

The important part from a financial perspective, is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that.

You know who does chase handsome amounts of money? Day traders and everyone gambling on the stock market.

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optymizer

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nickff  1 year ago

Because you specifically mention Alan Kay, I just finished reading “Dealers of Lightning”, which is about PARC, and says that the researchers there were very handsomely paid. IIRC, they were paid 20% more than their counterparts in ‘regular’ Xerox R&D. Xerox was also a big company, making a lot of money when it started PARC; arguably a monopoly (depending on how you define the term).

  • thefaux  1 year ago

    That still doesn't prove that Kay worked there because of the financial incentives. I don't think that 20% is nearly enough for most top talent to bail to an otherwise less attractive company if they deeply care about what they're working on so long as they aren't wildly underpaid. There needs to be a combination of incentives to drive movement.

    • nickff  1 year ago

      I don't know how you could prove or disprove why Kay worked somewhere fifty years ago, short of a written affidavit produced at the time. Additionally, most professionals don't admit that they took a job because of the pay, even if that's exactly why they did it; they usually say they 'went for a new challenge' or something like that.

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logicchains  1 year ago

> is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that

A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low margins, they wouldn't have had billions of dollars to spend on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in more competitive sectors have produced any large language models.