alt Hacker NewsThis is genius. Whenever a company does some fundamental discovery, you can point at some grant they once got for something vaguely adjacent and say "see! quasi-publicly funded!" and your worldview is saved.
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malcolmgreaves • today at 4:58 PM
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.
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It's not vaguely adjacent, the actual foundations of that research were directly publicly funded and wouldn't be possible without it - the author is not talking about how their PageRank algorithm got funded nor money that Google received.