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Comment by dingnuts

5 months ago

Your rhetorical begs the question -- I can't think of anything more recent than the MIT license.

What DO we rely on that has come out of MIT this century? I'm having a real hard time thinking of examples.

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dingnuts

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noodlesUK  5 months ago

I think when talking about university research output it's pretty clear that the objective of university research is to produce output that is much earlier in the stack of productisation than something that comes out of a corporate entity. The vast majority of university research probably won't impact people on a day-to-day basis the way that running a product-led company will, but that's not to say it isn't valuable.

Take mRNA vaccines for instance - the initial research began in university environments in the 80s, and it continued to be researched in universities (including in Europe) through the 00s until Moderna and BioNTech were started in the late 00s. All the exploratory work that led to the covid vaccine being possible was driven through universities up to the point where it became corporate. If that research hadn't been done, there would have been nothing to start a company about.

It's the same in computing - The modern wave of LLMs was set off by Attention is All you Need, sure, but the building blocks all came from academia. NNs have been an academic topic since the 80s and 90s.

I suspect that in 2050, there will be plenty of stuff being built on the foundations of work conducted in academia in the 00s and 10s.

I wouldn't expect to see that many groundbreaking innovations being useful in day-to-day life coming out of contemporary university research. You have to wait several decades to see the fruits of the labour.