[querez]

>> The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

> As the article notes, several companies (Apple, Google, etc.) could (currently) afford to fund such a lab, but there is no way their management and shareholders would approve.

Google did set up such a lab. The mission of Google Brain was literally to hire smart people and let them do work on whatever they want. ("Google Brain team members set their own research agenda, with the team as a whole maintaining a portfolio of projects across different time horizons and levels of risk." -- https://research.google.com/teams/brain/). Unsurprisingly, Google Brain is the place that originated the Transformer that powers the current AI craze (and many, many, many other AI innovations).

[areoform]

And they shut it down. In 2023.

The current tech giants spend a lot of money on "research," where research means optimizing parts of the product line to the 10^nth order of magnitude.

Arguably, Google Brain was one such lab. Albeit with more freedom than normal.

Which is fine, it's their money. But then they (and the broader public) shouldn't bemoan the lack of fundamental advances and a slowdown in the pace of discovery and change.

[sidibe]

"And they shut it down. In 2023"

You mean they renamed it/merged it with another group that has similar freedom and focus on research

[querez]

As someone who worked at both Brain and DeepMind: their cultures were very different. Brain was bottom-up, open-field research whatever you want/care for. DeepMind was much more narrowly focused and massively more top-down.

[nullhole]

What’s the name of the other group?

[esafak]

Deepmind. I'd say it's actually more reputable than Google Brain.

[zy0n911]

Deepmind

[sandkoan]

DeepMind.

[zipy124]

A decent amount of people seem to be unhappy/leaving deep-mind due to the forced focus on AI and lack of freedom currently though. Therefore the point above still stands.