Comment by Aurornis
9 hours ago
> Researchers are getting rewarded with VC money to try what remains a science experiment. That used to be a bad word
I’ve worked for multiple startups and I’ve watched startup job boards most of my career.
A lot of VC backed startups have a founder with a research background and are focused on providing out some hypothesis. I don’t see anything uncommon about this arrangement.
If you live near a University that does a lot of research it’s very common to encounter VC backed startups that are trying to prove out and commercialize some researcher’s experiment. It’s also common for those founders to spend some time at a FAANG or similar firm before getting VC funded.
Certainly research has made it into product with the help of the innovators that created the research. The dial is turned further here where the research ideas have yet to be tried and vetted. The research begins in the startup. Even in the dotcom era, the research prototypes were vetted in the conferences and journals before taking the risk to build production systems. This is no longer the case. The experiments have yet to be run.
Fusion, stem cells, CRISPR,robotics etc all come to mind.
Google also.
Yeah, but Sutskever and Murati wouldn't even tell investors what they were working on, and LeCun only has a long-term research direction - not any breakthrough or prototype to commercialize.
I agree there is nothing uncommon about that type of arrangement, but the amount of money involved is unprecedented.