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Comment by sigbottle | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's time for Bell Labs 2?

I guess everyone is racing towards AGI in a few years or whatever so it's kind of impossible to cultivate that environment.

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The Bell Labs we look back on was only the result of government intervention in the telecom monopoly. The 1956 consent decree forced Bell to license thousands of its patents, royalty free, to anyone who wanted to use them. Any patent not listed in the consent decree was to be licensed at "reasonable and nondiscriminatory rates."

The US government basically forced AT&T to use revenue from its monopoly to do fundamental research for the public good. Could the government do the same thing to our modern megacorps? Absolutely! Will it? I doubt it.

https://www.nytimes.com/1956/01/25/archives/att-settles-anti...

Used to be a Google X. Not sure at what scale it was. But if any state/central bank was clever they would subsidize this. That's a better trickle down strategy. Until we get to agi and all new discoveries are autonomously led by AI that is :p

Google X is a complete failure. Maybe they had fei-fei on staff for a short while but most of her work was done elsewhere.

Didn't the current LLMs stem from this...? Or it might be Google Brain instead. For Google X, there is Waymo? I know a lot of stuff didn't pan out. This is expected. These were 'moonshots'.

But the principle is there. I think that when a company sits on a load of cash, that's what they should do. Either that or become a kind of alternative investments allocator. These are risky bets. But they should be incentivized to take those risks. From a fiscal policy standpoint for instance. Well it probably is the case already via lower taxation of capital gains and so on. But there should probably exist a more streamlined framework to make sure incentives are aligned.

And/or assigned government projects? Besides implementing their Cloud infrastructure that is...

  > Google X is a complete failure

  - Google Brain
  - Google Watch/Wear OS
  - Gcam/Pixel Camera
  - Insight (indoor GMaps)
  - Waymo
  - Verily

It is a moonshot factory after all, not a "we're only going to do things that are likely to succeed" factory. It's an internal startup space, which comes with high failure rates. But these successes seem pretty successful. Even the failed Google Glass seems to have led to learning, though they probably should have kept the team going considering the success of Meta Raybands and with things like Snap's glasses.

https://x.company/projects/#graduate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Development#Graduated_projec...

It seems DeepMind is the closest thing to a well funded blue-sky AI research group, even despite the merger with Google Brain and now more of a product focus.

Google Deepmind is the closest lab to that idea because Google is the only entity that is big enough to get close to the scale of AT&T. I was skeptical that the Deepmind and Google Brain merge would be successful but it seems to have worked surprisingly well. They are killing it with LLMs and image editing models. They are also backing the fastest growing cloud business in the world and collecting Nobel prizes along the way.

https://www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/ai-research/2025/sam-altma...

Like the new spin out Episteme from OpenAI?

I thought that was Google. Regulators pretend not to notice their monopoly, they probably get large government contracts for social engineering and surveillance laundered through advertising, and the “don’t be evil” part is they make some open source contributions

The fact that people invest on the architecture that keeps getting increasingly better results is a feature, not a bug.

If LLMs actually hit a plateau, then investment will flow towards other architectures.

At which point companies that had the foresight to investigate those architectures earlier on will have the lead.

I'd argue SSI and Thinking Machines Lab seem to that environment you are thinking about. Industry labs that focuses on research without immediate product requirement.

I don't think that quite matches because those labs have very clear directions of research in LLMs. The theming is a bit more constrained and I don't know if a line of research as vague as what LeCun is pursuing would be funded by those labs.

I am of the opinion that splitting AT&T and hence Bell Labs was a net negative for America and rest of the world.

We are yet to create lab as foundational as Bell Labs.

Why would Bell Labs be a good fit? It was famous for embedding engineers with the scientists to direct research in a more results-oriented fashion.

We call it “legacy DeepMind”

> I guess everyone is racing towards AGI in a few years

A pipe dream sustaining the biggest stock market bubble in history. Smart investors are jumping to the next bubble already...Quantum...

> A pipe dream sustaining the biggest stock market bubble in history

This is why we're losing innovation.

Look at electric cars, batteries, solar panels, rare earths and many more. Bubble or struggle for survival? Right, because if US has no AI the world will have no AI? That's the real bubble - being stuck in an ancient world view.

Meta's stock has already tanked for "over" investing in AI. Bubble, where?

2 Trillion dollars in Capex to get code generators with hallucinations, that run at a loss, and you ask where is the Bubble?

> 2 Trillion dollars in Capex to get code generators with hallucinations

You assume that's the only use of it.

And are people not using these code generators?

Is this an issue with a lost generation that forgot what Capex is? We've moved from Capex to Opex and now the notion is lost, is it? You can hire an army of software developers but can't build hardware.

Is it better when everyone buys DeepSeek or a non-US version? Well then you don't need to spend Capex but you won't have revenue either.

Deepseek somehow didn't need $2T to happen.

Because you know how much they spent.

And that $2T you're referring to includes infrastructure like energy, data centers, servers and many things. DeepSeek rents from others. Someone is paying.

all that led up to Deepseek needed more. don't forget where it all comes from.

I think the argument can be made that Deepseek is a state sponsored needle looking to pop another states bubble.

If Deepseek is free it undermines the value of LLMs, so the value of these US companies is mainly speculation/FOMO over AGI.

> the argument can be made that Deepseek is a state sponsored needle looking to pop another states bubble

Who says they don't make money? Same with open source software that offer a hosted version.

> If Deepseek is free it undermines the value of LLMs, so the value of these US companies is mainly speculation/FOMO over AGI

Freemium, open source and other models all exist. Does it undermine the value of e.g. Salesforce?

"Big Tech Needs $2 Trillion In AI Revenue By 2030 or They Wasted Their Capex" - https://www.wheresyoured.at/big-tech-2tr/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45902246

This sounds crazy. We don't even know/can't define what human intelligence is or how it works , but we're trying to replicate it with AGI ?

If an LLM can pass a bar exam, isn't that at least a decent proof of concept or working model?

I love this application of AI the most but as many have stated elsewhere: mathematical precision in law won't work, or rather, won't be tolerated.

Do you have an example that you rely on for that kind of statement?

Or does this just prove lawyers are artificially intelligent?

yes, a glib response, but think about it: we define an intelligence test for humans, which by definition is an artificial construct. If we then get a computer to do well on the test we haven't proved it's on par with human intelligence, just that both meet some of the markers that the test makers are using as rough proxies for human intelligence. Maybe this helps signal or judge if AI is a useful tool for specific problems, but it doesn't mean AGI

I don't think the bar exam is scientifically designed to measure intelligence so that was an odd example. Citing the bar exam is like saying it passes the "Game of thrones trivia" exam so it must be intelligent.

As for IQ tests and the like, to the extent they are "scientific" they are designed based on empirical observations of humans. It is not designed to measure the intelligence of a statistical system containing a compressed version of the internet.

Intelligence and human health can't be defined neatly. They are what we call suitcase words. If there exists a physiological tradeoff between medical research about whether to live till 500 years or to be able to lift 1000kg when a person is in youth, those are different dimensions / directions across we can make progress. Same happens for intelligence. I think we are on right track.

Man, why did no one tell the people who invented bronze that they weren’t allowed to do it until they had a correct definition for metals and understood how they worked? I guess the person saying something can’t be done should stay out of the way of the people doing it.

I'm not sure what 'inventing bronze' is supposed to be. 'Inventing' AGI is pretty much equivalent to creating new life, from scratch. And we don't have an idea on how to do that either, or how life came to be.

>> I guess the person saying something can’t be done should stay out of the way of the people doing it.

I'll happily step out of the way once someone simply tells me what it is you're trying to accomplish. Until you can actually define it, you can't do "it".

no bro, others have done 'it' without even knowing what they were doing!

The big tech companies are trying to make machines that replace all human labor. They call it artificial intelligence. Feel free to argue about definitions.

No no, let's define labor (labour?) first.

Whatever you're doing for money that you wouldn't do if you didn't need money.

stretching the infinite game is exactly that, yes, "This is the way"

Hi there! :) Just wanted to gently flag that one of the terms (beginning with the letter "r") in your comment isn't really aligned with the kind of inclusive language we try to encourage across the community. Totally understand it was likely unintentional - happens to all of us! Going forward, it'd be great to keep things phrased in a way that ensures everyone feels welcome and respected. Thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts here!

My apologies, I have edited my comment.

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