alt Hacker NewsReal research at most big companies is dead. Unfortunately, what has replaced it is mostly venture-backed startups, where the timeline to a return is still expected to be quite short.
As a result, you end up with companies doing basic research under the guise of developing a product, announcing timelines which are never going to be met. Fusion energy and quantum computing startups are some of the most egregious examples of this.
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Agreed. I used to be an industrial researcher at one of the last companies that didn’t require their researchers to think of short-term productization goals. However, things changed at my former company, and I ended up leaving for a tenure-track position at a community college.
I don’t know what industrial research in CS is like in the era of agentic coding. On one hand I suppose building prototypes is faster than ever, but on the other hand I genuinely don’t know how well LLMs do with harder programming tasks. It’s one thing to have an agent work on a CRUD app, but I wonder how effective agents are at handling things like parallelism, distributed computing, load-balancing, and other topics that are harder to write than the average CRUD app. I am also aware of efforts such as Sakana AI’s automated scientific discovery research, and I wonder if many of the incremental, short-term research topics many companies pursue can be automated.
I’m a bit pessimistic about the state of research these days, from funding to publish-or-perish to the effects of generative AI (automation, AI slop publications, AI slop reviews). Then again, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, and maybe things are better than I think.
I have been shorting most of the Quantum Computing startups for about a year. They have been printing. Missed out on Fusion! (?) These were one of few examples of the market leaving money on the table. Others examples have been Nikola. Usually the scammyiest companies don't IPO.
There’s actually a bizarre irony.
Remember Bell labs, XEROX parc? Ask yourself why that existed and why research came out of them.
Monopoly.
So - many people don’t want to admit this but monopolies can be good from an R&D perspective, but without strong oversight by regulators - money will instead spent on R&D projects that specifically raise entry barriers.