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> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.

That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.

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Google has come pretty close. Who knows how long it would've been before someone else came up with Attention is all you need.

And yet they sat on transformers until OpenAI kicked off the AI boom by actually productizing that research in ChatGPT. Though it's possible they were just being cautious, my uncharitable view is that they knew this would disrupt their highly lucrative ads business, which is always the problem with monopolies.

Also you're overlooking other top-notch corporate research institutions like Microsoft Research, which arguably are more "Blue Sky" in the sense they are not constrained to any current product lines.

IBM Research when IBM was basically a monopoly was also an innovation machine.

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