Comment by foobarian
6 months ago
Maybe the 2025 Bell Labs is the wider ecosystem of VCs and free floating innovators who end up starting startups instead of doing things in house.
I do think there is a lot less low hanging fruit which makes the comparison apples and oranges. Google is like Bell Labs today, and what did they invent? LLMs? Compare that to information theory, the transistor, Unix, etc.
> Maybe the 2025 Bell Labs is the wider ecosystem of VCs and free floating innovators who end up starting startups instead of doing things in house.
Yep, agree with this statement. That's exactly what I think happened.
I have no idea what Bell Labs was like on the inside, but the startups I've been involved in didn't leave a lot of room for experimentation, trying and failing.
Quite the opposite, always a mad rush towards profit at any cost.