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Isn't the early MIT AI Lab a counterexample: that you can have smart people with basically free reign make big strides (such as HAKMEM)?

My understanding is they had very minimal supervision but effectively endless money from government funding.

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Well, there's "free reign", and there's Best-of-its-kind-in-the-world-University, DARPA-funded free reign.

There's Ayn Randism, and there's 20% time. These have wildly different utility to society.

Aren't PARC and SkunkWorks another counterexamples? Hell, wasn't most progress in science and technology in the post-WWII era stemming from free rein and unlimited budgets of the Cold War period?

Sounds like survivorship bias. What about MKULTRA? That's free rein and afaik an unlimited budget.

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