Sam Altman feels Silicon Valley has lost its innovation culture, saying great research hasn’t happened there in a ‘long time’::“Before OpenAI, what was the last really great scientific breakthrough that came out of a Silicon Valley company?” Altman said on a Wednesday podcast.
This is not exactly true but it mostly is. Check the transistor and laser for some counterexamples. The sampling theorem was also discovered at Bell Labs.
These are all so old that I think it supports the point. A lot of today’s useful materials, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals were invented by corporations around that time, but in recent history, corporate labs have been gutted and cherry pick out of universities.
E.g. in recent history, AlexNet came out of utoronto, Google bought Alex’s startup shortly after, and then Google started developing deep learning models.
Bell labs was a real outlier.
It was funded by a regulated monopoly, with the government saying that a percentage of all profits had to go to R&D. They were not even allowed to give Unix to anyone other than universities, let alone profit of it.
