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Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

What's the issue with large companies plowing their profits into pure research?

It seems to be difficult to turn the pure research back into new products. Apple famously got lots of ideas for free from Xerox PARC. Google researchers wrote the Attention Is All You Need paper and they're now desperately playing catchup because they couldn't convert it to any kind of product. There's nothing wrong with companies investing in pure research, but these large companies sometimes are unable to take advantage of the research. The people running the business want to keep doing what got them successful, not some new experimental thing that might not work.

Yeah being first doesn’t mean you win automatically. There’s a story about the Ramones playing a show at a famous club in NYC and everyone in the crowd went home and started bands that became way more successful and famous than who they were trying to be like. …I think blondie was one of the bands that came out of that crowd.

You might be thinking of the Sex Pistols gig whose audience of 30-40 included Morrissey, Mark E Smith, the Buzzcocks and Lower Broughton: https://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2006/05/11...

The docudrama 24 hour party people is good to watch about this era.

Sorry, mental blip, replace "Lower Broughton" with "Joy Division" (!)

But everyone and their mom would rather be the Ramones than Blondie, LOL

> Google researchers wrote the Attention Is All You Need paper and they're now desperately playing catchup because they couldn't convert it to any kind of product.

This isn't true. The transformer underlied Google Translate for a long time. They just didn't monetize Google Translate heavily enough. It's still one of the best translation services out there. And its ability to translate real-time conversations has been around for years now.

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