Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
nj.com
nj.com
> When Nokia’s research arm, Nokia Bell Labs, said in early December the company will move out of the Murray Hill campus over the next five years to relocate to a new tech hub being built in New Brunswick, the announcement spurred an outpouring of memories online from current and former employees.
> Bell Labs’ new headquarters will be located at the HELIX innovation center in New Brunswick. Originally known as “The Hub,” the HELIX innovation center will be a large complex in the city’s downtown on the site of the former Ferren Mall.
More news on the real estate side of things:
https://re-nj.com/legacy-moment-inside-the-landmark-deal-to-...
I'm excited for New Brunswick here. Would love to see this small city develop. With relatively cheap cost of living, Rutgers, decent zoning (they've got a number of highrises and seem to be adding more), and being a few train stops away from NYC (and a direct bus IIRC?) it seems like a really compelling place to invest in.
So, while working with Verizon, they falsely claimed it to be Basking Ridge, NJ (which they bought and boasted as the Brains of Bell to invoke a symbolic victory of sorts) until I found out they were either lying or swindled and it was another place in Jersey. Yet again, I find out from you that it was just another fake "Brains of Bell".
Even though I feel used once again, I do appreciate your post.
No. Unix, C, C++, etc were in nj.
Wow. I remember reading in some of the early books about C or Unix (such as K&R or K&P), the words "Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey" in one of the early pages, such as the Introduction, Preface or copyright page.
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from Australia.
I wonder why they'd block an entire country...
Geoblocks for no prticular reason a really sad, but widespread, practice.
> They likely just block non-us.
Link was and is working for me here in the uk.
We didn't spend much time with her while we were there, but on the last night she wanted to join us with some of her friends for dinner. Since I was going to be having dinner with a group of old retired ladies, I figured we could just make some polite small talk with them and be on our way after the meal.
After we ordered drinks, one of them turns to me and says "now what do you do for work?" I said "oh I work with computers", a simple generic phrase I use when talking with older people. She says "oh that's interesting, what specifically?" When I told her I was a software engineer, her face lights up and she points around the room and says "oh that's wonderful - we all did that as well, we worked at a company called Bell Labs. Have you heard of it?"
I just about fell out of my chair. For the rest of the night I was asking them all sorts of questions about their work. They were around back when you'd program using punch cards and all that stuff. It was a very cool experience - one of my favorite memories.
I also got the sense that even though they knew Bells Labs was important, they weren't quite aware of just how fundamental it was to...well basically everything we do today.
> "For over half a century, Bell Labs had been owned by the telephone monopoly AT&T and had plenty of money to spend on science. But in 1984, the monopoly broke up, and after 1989, managers encouraged Bell Lab researchers to focus on research with commercial applications. Disenchanted, top scientists began to leave for universities and were mostly not replaced by new recruits. In 1995, ownership of Bell Labs was transferred to the newly formed company Lucent Technologies."
Then Lucent got hit by the dot-com bubble blowout, resulting in a 30% loss of share value in Jan 2000. This led to a new focus on PR:
> "By keeping up its practice of releasing exciting scientific findings, the lab could continue to demonstrate to investors, customers and anyone else that Lucent had a sound, long-term technological future. Again, this was a question of survival: with revenues falling, managers had to make the argument that their jobs and the jobs of their staff were worth keeping."
This led to a culture in which critical scrutiny of the claims of one fraudulent researcher was discouraged in favor of institutional cheerleading, and the end result was that 15 papers published in Science and Nature had to be retracted.
[1] "Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World" (2009) Eugenie Samuel Reich.
If you want a parable for what's happened to Bell Labs and many other scientific institutions in the US, it's that of the greedy farmer killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Eliminating Bayh-Dole would mean university-based patents generated with taxpayer funds would be available to any interested party under a non-exclusive licensing program, and then corporations would again be incentivized to maintain private research centers - which IIRC also served a tax-writeoff function for AT&T in Bell Lab's heyday.
At least some of the 80s vintage corporate labs like DEC were being increasingly folded into the broader engineering organizations as their parents became less dominant. Essentially corporate research labs are a creature of organizations that have some long-term play money. Or at least that's the idea. I'd note that some of the current work going on in quantum computing has a lineage that dates back to some pretty fundamental research done in corporate labs in the 1960s.
Currently leading tech research? Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, and for some ungodly reason, Elon Musk with his government grants and Teslabucks. These are all effective monopolies in several sectors to the point where dethroning any of them is going to require either a massive change in the world through new technology or extensive multi-governmental legal action. These companies have the ability to spend a lot of money on something stupid (for the ones we have seen in the public eye, see Stadia, Metaverse, Itanium, we had Plan 9 as Bell's last hurrah into the void, these types of stupid things.) which loses it for the promise of an eventual golden egg. As a theory I'd say this is a pretty good one considering that it extends well into the modern day.
Ideally, we'd probably fund research in some better way, but I have no clue how the hell that would even work. Until then, the future comes in the form of price fixing and anti-competitive practices.
In general, the US probably does a decent job of funding research. Small scale research orgs within companies are often practical. There are company and government grants to both academia and commercial/academic partnerships. VCs, for their faults, do fund pretty speculative work.
For the reasons you say, big corporate research labs require conditions that are mostly not an unalloyed good at best.
During the time I was on campus it was mostly empty. There were old computers still inside some rooms. I felt like I had been transported to the 80s or 90s in one hall and some halls even more decades in the past.
Really grand. I can’t imagine what it was like in its heyday.
I was lucky enough to work at Microsoft in building 2, one of 8 matching buildings from the mid-80s, and it absolutely felt special at the time. In my imagination, it had some of the same vibe as Bell Labs did in its heyday. I was on the Visual Studio team, and great things were happening. I knew it. I also knew that team was special.
No one else in Visual Studio seemed that interested – they were just too busy and I think maybe too young to get it.
Buildings 1-8 were demolished few years ago, but I had been gone from the company for decades by that time. I did grieve a bit.
Places developing the next mRNA vaccines for cancer?
Places developing AI?
Electric cars?
I know a few people who wanted to get away from the FANG hype grind and went to NASA.
They tell me they’re doing actual engineering for engineerings sake. Which sounds great.
Salary obviously not comparable to FANG 400k plus but the satisfaction and pride is well worth the sacrifice to them.
Me and most of my friends are “super American” like I’m an immigrant who wears USA hats and t shirts. I would love to work at NASA once I have established a little place for myself here. I would be so proud to contribute to this country and its success in space and research.
Microsoft Research is also pivoting into this area.
mRNA designs are still a bit primitive. Moderna and BioNTech resemble corporations, rather than skunkworks.
I was lucky enough to work at Microsoft in building 2, one of 8 matching buildings from the mid-80s, and it absolutely felt special at the time. In my imagination, it had some of the same vibe as Bell Labs did in its heyday. I was on the Visual Studio team, and great things were happening. I knew it. I also knew that team was special.
No one else in Visual Studio seemed that interested – they were just too busy and I think maybe too young to get it.
Buildings 1-8 were demolished few years ago, but I had been gone from the company for decades by that time. I did grieve a bit.
It's a strange thought that the building I spent so many hours, days, years in is now just a thing seen out of the passenger window as I drive by, for maybe 2 seconds.
"pinball"
by Steven Levy.
I think he also wrote some of the other well known books, maybe including fire in the valley. need to check.
He is a journalist, so the book is sure to be embellished to sound good, but a cool read nonetheless, IMO.
>Really grand. I can’t imagine what it was like in its heyday.
You may have seen this already, but sharing it for others:
Here is one image from that time, which I had seen sometime earlier:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ken_Thompson_(sitting)_...
It's one of my favorite books; throughout my time reading it I would periodically put it down and just sit with awe in imagining the science and the work happening there throughout the years depicted.
I need to sit down and read it again; but I'm afraid to, as in a way it just gives me this odd sense of mixed unfounded nostalgia and jealousy and a bit of dread for not being a part of something similar anymore.
In some corridor, somewhere in the world, the next Bell Labs is currently under way and others will read books about it in the future. You just have to figure out where it is :)
I’ve had middling success creating opportunities but that’s very far from being in an environment where there so much interesting going on around you
Also @dsgnr you're posts are currently hell banned
Interestingly enough, a lot of senior ibm labs folks have joined jpmorgan or similar organizations over time
If I remember correctly, MSR worked on a practical implementation of Code-Contracts for C# which incorporated the (all-important) compile-time verification of method preconditions, postconditions, and class invariants (without the need for hand-written refinement-types, which is how we do things today): as I understand it, the compile-time part of system could support any assertion represented as a pure-function - think of it as C#'s take on Ada's assertions, improved tenfold, and it even shipped for a now-unsupported older version of C# and .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/debug-tra...
...and it was axed in .NET Core back in 2016 and hasn't been seen since: https://github.com/microsoft/CodeContracts/issues/409
Had Microsoft put more backing behind it, then C# could present itself as a language to supplant Ada in safety-critical applications, and replace C/C++ in other applications.
I have hope the feature will come back one-day - there are whole slews of bugs that can be eliminated (such as when passing EF entity types around with unintentionally null member-properties).
I've heard mixed things about it as a company but GResearch (also UK) seemed like an interesting R&D software / math mix in the vein of investment banking. I applied there over ten years ago so YMMV at this point, who knows.
Isn't math necessary for most real-world engineering, and even in CS research? And what were you expecting? You asked for a cutting edge Bell-Labs type of R&D place, and that's what research is all about, even in CS.
You'll work with a lot of new yet-unproven theoretical concepts for which you need a lot of math to prove they have a high chance of working in practice and being better than existing solutions, before someone approves budget for the costly development and implementation of an actual product.
In the case of mechanical engineers, maybe 1 in 50 bonafide geniuses in mechanical engineering are also simultaneously math geniuses. Just my personal hunch.
There's really not that many positions, so it's unrealistic to expect recruiting standards to be much lower.
Look at what's going on with ML/AI - DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAIR now moved into a product group alongside Meta's GenAI group, Microsoft essentially outsourcing AI to OpenAI, OpenAI may as well call itself GPTCorp - a single-product commercial enterprise.
I guess it's not surprising given how short term the thinking is of today's publicly traded companies.
This describes Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, as well as modern counterparts like MSR and DeepMind. As always, only a very small portion of the work force gets to do blue sky stuff - the rest have to do the "mundane" bits of making money.
Let's not be fooled by rose-tinted glasses here - even in its heyday Bell Labs was small fraction of the overall Bell operations, and likewise Xerox Parc an extremely prestigious but yet small slice of the overall enterprise.
I don’t really agree that training massive causal LMs is a “product focus”.
I agree that there is an increasing product focus in orgs like OAI, but a lot of that is coming from new growth rather than trading off with base research.
I'd hope that Google DeepMind's mission statement is a bit broader than that, but certainly Gemini seems to be the focus. It seems to me there's a world of difference between DeepMind's original goal of developing AGI (via whatever means - as a research objective), and now being told they have to build LLMs.
If we compare Google to Meta, it seems it used to be that DeepMind was equivalent to FAIR as a pure research organization, and Brain equivalent to Meta's product focused ML group(s), but now the joint Google DeepMind is more akin to Meta's GenAI group, and there is no unfettered research group at Google left free to pursue AGI in any way other than hoping it can be developed out of LLMs. However, FAIR also seems constrained now that they have been moved into a product-focused part of the organization (under CPO Chris Cox).
There is a ton of further research to be done in deep models. A lot of it will incorporate LLMs because that is currently the most powerful primitive you have. Research is a lot more closed now but I would not take that to mean research is no longer happening.
I'm just writing about the changes to these organizations, and their corporate governance, as reported in the press. I don't think you need to be an insider to appreciate the difference between, say, DeepMind as an independent entity pursuing AGI anyway they saw fit (RL), and now as part of Google DeepMind apparently tasked with developing SOTA LLMs. No doubt this is still a research vs pure engineering endeavor, but hard to call it blue sky when the research direction and goal is so proscribed. I personally don't believe that LLMs (or RL for that matter) are the path to AGI, but at least DeepMind used to have the flexibility to pivot and pursue whatever lines of research they felt were most promising. Do they still have that flexibility today?
Mm, care to share? I am skeptical when people make claims like this, even though it is very achievable. Many people are simply "playing house" when it comes to ML tech.
I would not believe everything you read even in the tech aligned press, it is very often false. Google Deepmind is not exclusively researching LLMs.
What has changed from DeepMind as independent entity to Google DeepMind (following the hivemind LLM "path" to AGI ;) ) ?
What does it mean for FAIR to now be part of a product group ?
I'm sure the CEOs of these companies hope these changes are significant and will better align these research organizations with their corporate goals and marketplace opportunities ...
Is OpenAI pursuing AGI-directed research outside of LLMs, or is it now all hands on deck towards next GPT 5.0 product release ?
I am not sure about FAIR, but they have been chatbot/LLM/ASR focusd from before this change.
OpenAI has definitely pivoted towards product. ! Most of that pivot is through new growth while still maintaining existing research products, but I wont deny there is a new level of product focus.
Could someone like Google or Microsoft build a Bell Labs today? Yes, almost certainly, but there's no financial incentive to do so. And the shareholders would not be pleased if you told them you were going to spend their money on something with no connection to the business.
A bigger question for the present is: why are the universities failing so badly? Their incentives have not changed, but we don't get the kind of innovative research we got out of Bell Labs. I don't know what the answer to that is.
In my opinion, professors at research universities have to contend with the pressures of raising grant money in a competitive environment combined with "publish or perish" pressures. Even post-tenure there are ways universities could punish "non-productive" faculty members at institutions where professors are regularly expected to publish at top journals/conferences and raise grant money. It's not that much different from the pressure their corporate research counterparts face, where they have to regularly justify their employment by producing a regular flow of research results that have business impact. This pressure to produce results on a regular schedule, whether in industry or in academia, is something that I strongly believe stifles science and forces scientists to make evolutionary "sure bets" instead of working on riskier, more revolutionary projects like the ones that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC researchers got to work on during those labs' heydays.
Alan Kay, who worked at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, has a lot to say about supporting long-term, revolutionary research here (http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/).
In my opinion, the simple answer is that we need institutions that provide researchers the freedom and space to work on riskier, longer-term projects, and we also need funding to support such research.
For my personal career, I'm reminded of this quote from physicist J. J. Thomson made over a century ago:
"Granting the importance of this pioneering research, how can it best be promoted? The method of direct endowment will not work, for if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." (from https://archive.org/details/b29932208/page/198/mode/2up).
My career goal is to find a way to make a living outside of research that provides me enough time to do the research I want to do. This way I'm free from the pressures of either "publish or perish" from academia or "profit or perish" from industry.
I went to Holmdel High and my girlfriend’s dad was a distinguished engineer at the Holmdel Bell Labs installation, we drove by regularly (loved the transistor water tower), and got to visit him inside the building a few times. It was awe inspiring as an 18 year old to enter into such a sacred hall of engineering and science. I had a strong engineering bent since I was little, but knowing such a towering figure cemented it (inventor of Adaptive Delta Modulation).
That's okay. Even the most innovative companies are allowed to have to one or two terrible ideas.
Every. Single. Amazing endeavor that’s ever happened has people who describe contributing to that endeavor this way. Every one.
It brings to mind the kind of world that could exist without profit motives, where people do things simply because they’ve never been done before. Like maybe the world that Star Trek illustrates.
I think the greatest regret in my life isn’t that I won’t see Alpha Centauri with my own eyes, but that we can’t fucking figure out how to make our world like this.
But I feel in the real world the profit motive is pretty important. In systems that have been tried so far that attempted to eliminate the profit motive (Soviet system, Chinese economic system prior to free market reforms) the lack of profit motive seems to have led to stagnation and bloated centralized bureaucrats unable to do things effectively.
Also remember that there are lots of important jobs out there for society to function properly that are unglamorous. Lots of jobs in the medical field for example or waste disposal or toilet cleaning and so on. In a world without money who would be doing such jobs? Why would anyone clean toilets without being paid for it?
In the Star Trek utopia the assumption is that people would do it anyway for the betterment of society. But today in the real world it seems money and the profit motive is necessary both on a micro level and on a macro level.
EDIT: I realized this comment may come off as too argumentative. Not my intention. I sympathize with your underlying sentiment. I just wanted to add my thoughts too. I apologize if any of this came off as hostile in any way
People from around the world can collaborate easily on incredibly projects such as Linux or OpenRISC. Or on closed-source projects as used by FAANG companies.
"In 1969, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson developed UNIX, a computer programming language. Nokia"
:-|
:p