The truth is that kind of research can only happen with a very rich monopoly.
Bell labs came about when AT&T was the monopoly telephone provider in the US.
PARC happened when Xerox had a very lucrative monopoly on copy machines.
Bell labs came about when AT&T was the monopoly telephone provider in the US.
PARC happened when Xerox had a very lucrative monopoly on copy machines.
On a smaller scale, there is The Institute for Advanced Study where curiosity-driven research is encouraged, and there is the MacArthur Fellowship where fellows are granted $150,000 annual stipends for five years for them to pursue their visions with no strings attached. Other than these, though, I’m unaware of any other institutions or grants that truly promote curiosity-driven research.
I’ve resigned myself to the situation and have thus switched careers to teaching, where at least I have 4 months of the year “off the clock” instead of the standard 3-4 weeks of PTO most companies give in America.
10 billion yearly losses for something that by all accounts isn't close to magically becoming profitable. It honestly just seems like something he thinks is cool and therefore dumps money in.
To be fair, though; Facebook, I mean, Meta is a publicly-traded company and if the shareholders get tired of not seeing any ROI from Meta's VR initiatives, then this could compel Zuck to stop. Even Zuck isn't free from business pressures if the funding is coming from Meta and not out of Zuck's personal funds.
Back to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, my understanding of how they worked is that while management did set the overall direction, researchers were given very wide latitude when pursuing this direction with little to no pressure to deliver immediate results and to show that their research would lead to profits. Indeed, at one point AT&T was forbidden by the federal government from entering businesses outside of their phone business, and in the case of Xerox PARC, Robert Taylor was able to negotiate a deal with Xerox executives where Xerox's executives wouldn't meddle in the affairs of PARC for the first five years. (Once those five years ended, the meddling began, culminating with Bob Taylor's famous exit in 1983.)
Since he has 57% of the votes, he can tell everyone to pound sand.
if it become the case, meta get 30% of the revenues associated with it.
If it does not, i'm pretty sure they can now make good smartphones and even have a dedicated os. I'm pretty sure they can find a way to make money with it.
A meta quest 3s in inself is an insane experience for 330€ and it's current main disadvantages for gaming are the lack of players and the catalogue size. Even using it as a main monitor with a bluetooth keyboard is "possible". I would have find it 'improbable' a few years ago even as an enthousiasth, i now could totally imagine a headset replacing my screen in a few years with a few improvements on.
But from the days of Bell Labs, haven't we greatly improved our ability to connect between some research concept to the idea of doing something useful, somewhere ?
And once you have that you can be connected to grants or some pre-VC funding, which might suffice, given the tools we have for conceptual development of preliminary ideas(simulation, for ex.) is far better than what they had at Bell?
As big of a fan I am of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, I don't want to come across as saying that the Bell Labs and Xerox PARC models of research are the only ways to do research. Indeed, Bell Labs couldn't convert many of its research ideas to products due to the agreement AT&T made with the federal government not to expand into other businesses, and Xerox PARC infamously failed to successfully monetize many of its inventions, and many of these researchers left Xerox for other companies who saw the business potential in their work, such as Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft, to name a few.
However, the problem with our current system of grants and VC funding is that they are not a good fit for riskier avenues of research where the impacts cannot be immediately seen, or the impact will take many years to develop. I am reminded of Alan Kay's comments (https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/) on how NSF grants require an explanation of how the researchers plan to solve the problem, which precludes exploratory research where one doesn't know how to attack the problem. Now, once again, this question from the NSF is not inappropriate; there are different phases of research, and coming up with an "attack plan" that is reasonable and is backed by a command of the prior art and a track record of solving other problems is part of research; all PhD programs have some sort of thesis proposal that requires answering the same question the NSF asks in its proposals. With that said, there is still the early phase of research where researchers are formulating the question, and where researchers are trying to figure out how they'd go about solving the problem. This early phase of research is part of research, too.
I think the funding situation for research depends on the type of research being done. For more applied research that has more obvious impact, especially business impact, then I believe there are plenty of opportunities out there that are more appropriate than old-school industrial research labs. However, for more speculative work where impacts are harder to see or where they are not immediate, the funding situation is much more difficult today compared to in the past where industrial research labs were less driven by the bottom line, and when academics had fewer "publish-or-perish" pressures.
In short, Bell Labs-style institutions not only require consistent sources of funding that only monopolies can commit to, but they also require stakeholders to believe that funding such institutions is beneficial. We don't have those stakeholders today, though.
[1] US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case:
A classification which includes government funding, note.