alt Hacker NewsIts not a bad thing, but exploratory research as opposed to reaearch that finetunes along a path already paved by exploratory research is something that doesn’t usually happen much in for-profit product-oriented firms when there is such a path available; it happens in academia and corporate labs pick it up once it reaches the point where the basics show commercial promise. CS is a little bit of an exception because the capital cost of basic research isn’t, proportionally, as high, and because the promise-to-product path is often short enough that having done the basic work in house can be a meaningful advantage in getting to market first (though, see Google on much of modern AI for a counterexample).
But even in computing, when there is a promising way forward that the basic reaearch has been done on, its hard to justify side quests.
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> CS is a little bit of an exception because the capital cost of basic research isn’t, proportionally, as high, and because the promise-to-product path is often short enough that having done the basic work in house can be a meaningful advantage in getting to market first (though, see Google on much of modern AI for a counterexample)
...And because they have monopoly money. Basically, research labs are usually vanity spending for corporations with too much money. Xerox parc was funded by a monopoly. Bell labs was funded by a monopoly. Google funds its moonshots with its monopoly.
Those exploratory "side quests" in industry are how we got the transistor, the liquid crystal display, Shannon's information theory, the laser and practical photovoltaic cells, among many other foundational technologies upon which we rely today.