Observationally, larger companies already in the lead seem prefer a safe X% return for their shareholders and don't need to take large risks. Smaller companies trying to make it don't have the liberty to rest on their laurels, and often will be risking it all on some idea being a massive hit.
Following that logic, Microsoft and oracle should be putting out a lot of innovative quirky software!
I can’t think of a single example where a super large company gets more willing to take risks when it gets larger. Theres probably a few exceptions but I can’t think of any.
the most obvious display of risk aversion is the greenlighting and production of "Spiderman 35 Electric Boogaloo" and "Batman # 740 The Dark Knight Re-Rises Again" -- meanwhile indies are still struggling to find first investors or writing money.
as I said in another comment : These large firms do not take risk.
You don't need a citation for everything. It's common sense.
But sure, look at big tech with a money printing machine, insane margins and revenue. Amazon spends 90b a year on r&d (~14% of revenue). Meta is about 26% of revenue and so on.
That's risk as it's not tied to their core business and most if not all is punted away.
Can you give me a citation of a small company willing to punt 14-24% of their revenue on long term projects that may not bare any results?
How much of Meta's r&d is spent on keeping people addicted to their apps? I'd argue Amazon and Meta were both more innovative when there was no or very little revenue.
Meta essentially replaced myspace, which basically went down hill after being bought out by a much larger company.
Why do you ask questions you can easily ask to an LLM? You probably don't care, your world view is "Meta bad".
Meta created and support React which runs much of the internet. Pytorch, which runs most AI models. GraphQL, Jest, Llama (one of the first open weights models) and more that I can't remember.
An engineer who worked at Meta did some stuff on his personal Github and managed to get them to adopt it. They weren't being innovative, they got someone else to do the prototyping and then brought it in.
Much like the same conversation about other large organisations that buy to "innovate".
> ...Pytorch
Didn't they just hire some of the maintainers of Torch7, who had started on the rework of implementing lessons learnt and migration to Python? So you while you could say they "created PyTorch", it would be quite misleading.
History well supports that large companies do not innovate well, with nearly all collapsing due to stagnation and bureaucracy. A predicted bad outcome does not mean they can avoid it