[brunellus]

Agreed. Non-competes always seemed incongruous to the tech/startup zeitgeist of the last 10-15 years. But just by walking around in Boston, one can simply look at the architecture and infer it’s a parochial, old school little city. Power struggles abound, and corporations tend to dominate there.

Increasingly I have come to believe that managers learned to represent their tech companies as “startups” in order to justify disorganization and less than stellar salaries.

[lsllc]

Exactly, while the legislature let EMC "lobby away" the attempts to meaningfully reform non-competes, Gov. Healy wonders why the AI lead has slipped from the state and is now forming an AI "task force":

https://whdh.com/news/gov-healey-assembles-artificial-intell...

“Boston, in general, was one of the leading spots for AI,” said task force member Usama Fayyad, who is Executive Director of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. “For I would say a couple of decades, in the very beginnings of artificial intelligence.”

“The governor was saying, ‘Hey, why have we let this lead slip away from our state and how do we bring it back in a big way?’ I think the state is going to identify areas of strength where we can have distinction,” he said.

[anamax]

Boston/Mass has let every tech "lead" for the last 60 years "slip away," so why would AI be any different?

Boston has never actually had a lead, but it has had the opportunity to be competitive, especially when MIT was significantly better than Stanford, but every time things have played out the same way.

And yes, there have been task forces and various govt programs and all that before. They all say and do the same things and get the same results, namely re-elected and annoyed when someone points out that they've moved on to ranting about other things, having done nothing to stop yet another tech from playing out elsewhere.