[malcolmgreaves]

The author is correct. It is incredibly simple to trace how public research spending creates scientific advancements and how private companies add on the last 1-3% to commercialize the research.

If you want to learn, go trace how deep learning was funded. It started off with USPS.

[skrebbel]

My entire argument is that techno-libertarians can enthusiastically say that all great innovations were done inside companies, and progressives/marxists/etc can enthusiastically say that well actually, many of those developments started with publicly funded research projects and public-private partnerships, and both are completely right at the same time because reality is messy. It doesn't prove nor disprove anything about whether governments or companies are better at innovation, or deserve more of the credit, or the upsides.

[cestith]

Governments can be really good at setting incentives other than immediate profit. That’s where a lot of basic research and the growth of applied engineering toward future products happens.

[omcgrann]

This is right, and it's more or less what I was arguing in the piece. Google built the transformer. That's not in dispute. The point is that they built it inside a research ecosystem that traces back through decades of publicly funded work--DARPA, NSF, university labs, the whole pipeline from perceptrons through backpropagation through the GPU computing that made large-scale training feasible.

Both things are true at the same time, and acknowledging the public foundation doesn't diminish the private achievement. It does raise a question about who should benefit from what gets built on top of it, which is what the piece is concerned with.