Sam Altman feels Silicon Valley has lost its innovation culture, saying great research hasn’t happened there in a ‘long time’::“Before OpenAI, what was the last really great scientific breakthrough that came out of a Silicon Valley company?” Altman said on a Wednesday podcast.
Corpos never provided any valuable research. They just take what publicly funded universities, institutes, and institutions publish and use that to build products then claim all the credits.
This is not exactly true but it mostly is. Check the transistor and laser for some counterexamples. The sampling theorem was also discovered at Bell Labs.
Bell labs was a real outlier.
It was funded by a regulated monopoly, with the government saying that a percentage of all profits had to go to R&D. They were not even allowed to give Unix to anyone other than universities, let alone profit of it.
Exactly. This is a detrimental difference. It was not an unregulated virulent profit mongering corporation.
These are all so old that I think it supports the point. A lot of today’s useful materials, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals were invented by corporations around that time, but in recent history, corporate labs have been gutted and cherry pick out of universities.
E.g. in recent history, AlexNet came out of utoronto, Google bought Alex’s startup shortly after, and then Google started developing deep learning models.
Exactly, what they do isn’t exactly research in most cases. It’s product development in kist cases. Big difference
The last decade the only innovation that’s come out of silicon valley was to just find creative ways to do what an existing industry already does, but through an app and without needing to pay workers full wages.
Or coming up with festive ways to shoehorn a subscription into a service that shouldn’t require one. This is all the fault of investors.
Sam Altman is a part of it too, as much as he likes to pretend he’s not.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman took yet another dig at Silicon Valley, saying the technology mecca no longer has an innovation culture.
There have not been for a long time," Altman said on a Wednesday podcast interview with Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norwegian sovereign wealth fund Norges Bank Investment.
“I’m surprised you say that there was no innovation culture in Silicon Valley, because that’s a bit contrary to what I thought,” Tangen shot back.
To this, Altman responded by saying Silicon Valley did have a product innovation culture, but he felt it missed the mark on groundbreaking research.
Altman seemed to attribute Silicon Valley’s shift away from innovation to the ease and allure of creating “super-valuable companies” in minimal time using existing technology like the internet and mobile phones — which, he said, “sucked up a lot of talent.”
Sam Altman and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, sent outside regular business hours.
The original article contains 392 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot
Maybe not in the field of computer science, but silicon valley is home to a lot of hardware companies that are doing great research every year. Intel, Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA-tencor, etc. That’s just in semiconductors. There’s also a ton of battery research in the area. Lots of consumer electronics too, particularly from Apple (I don’t like their products, but they have been the driving force behind advancements which have helped other fields, such as O2 blood sensors and hearing aids), but there are many others as well.
Silicon valley is not just software. Maybe by market cap it is, but in terms of hours of labor I don’t think software wins.
Once too many BAs move in the innovation and quality drops.
