Comment by jgord
2 days ago
fair enough .. how do we fund the next generation of tech development ?
Governments giving money as science grants ?
Are you against all VC investment in startups ?
Philanthropy donations ?
or.. would millionaires be the people starting new startups and doing science research to scratch their own itch ?
I guess the history of science and tech has examples of all of the above.
> Governments giving money as science grants ?
I think there's a place for government to invest and incentivise startups for sure, but man do you ever need to watch it like an eagle or it will quickly devolve into malignant opportunism on the tax payers dime.
As an example, up here in Canada, we have the Scientific research and experimental development (SR&ED) tax incentives program. Basically a significant business tax reduction that any company could get (including those that shouldn't), but it required a ceremony / lengthy and annoying process that was quickly outsourced for a percentage of the gains. So now we have businesses who's sole purpose is to get SR&ED for your startup.
So SR&ED is now mandatory for Canadian tech businesses since it saves you 30-50% in tax. We're talking big boys like Shopify too.
Implementation really really matters, and you need to constantly review these things for abuses or they quickly devolve into a transfer of wealth.
yeah.. Ive noticed a kind of anti-pattern - governments funding various startup programs, which end up being totally useless to _actual_ startups, but great plays for the next level investors [ eg. the real estate investor who rents out the "accelerator space" ]
My hope is that the actual next generation of tech development isn't going to be VC and hype-cycle funded. I hope that we will go back to bootstrapped smart people making actual things that people actually want, rather than VCs breathlessly hyping stuff like fake money and plagiarism machines that nobody wants.
> making actual things ..
ahh, am trying to do that - largely self-funded RnD over 4 years -
Also trying to wake people up about the scope for ML to be applied to real engineering problems / processes ..
We hear of applied-RL/ML examples at the elite end, such as taming fusion plasma, weather prediction on a desktop, solving protein structure from DNA sequence etc..
Yet there are vast applications such as training robot hands to sort refuse for recycling, optimal heat flow in industrial processes, silicon chip layout, 2D photos to 3D models ...
My own startup domain is detecting geometry in pointclouds .. which is currently a lot of repetitive manual labor done for the construction industry.
It is frustrating talking to VCs .. because they really dont believe there is any other AI than LLMs.
My guess is the only people who will fund this kind of useful tech are post-exit technical founders.
> Are you against all VC investment in startups ?
No.
Nor am I against angel investing. Except that I (personally) would never do it.