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by bko 11 days ago
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?
2 comments
shagmin 11 days ago
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.

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bko 11 days ago
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.

What are you talking about?

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happymellon 10 days ago
> Meta created and support React

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.

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mint5 11 days ago
That world model is not in touch with reality.

R&D spend does not correlate with innovation or creativity. It’s surprising what gets counted as R&D in a big company.

Small companies have to have an innovative product in order to compete with the big fish who operate economies of scale.

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bko 11 days ago
Very productive comment. Here is my reply:

R&D spend does correlate with innovation and creativity. It’s surprising what it takes to consider something as R&D in a big company.

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