by areoform on 5/11/25, 8:47 PM with 234 comments
by pmb on 5/12/25, 7:27 AM
Decades later, AT&T was broken up into the baby bells and the consent decree was removed at that time. Bell Labs' fate was then sealed - it no longer had a required legal minimum funding level, and the baby bells were MBA-run monstrosities that were only interested in "research" that paid dividends in the next 6 months in a predictable fashion.
The funding model is an integral part of the story.
by YouWhy on 5/12/25, 5:50 AM
Today we have a huge oversupply of scientists, however there's too many of them to allow judging for potential, and many are not actually capable of dramatic impact.
More generally, a standard critique for "reproducing a golden age" narratives are that the golden age existed within a vastly different ecosystem and indeed - stopped working due to systemic reasons, many of which still apply.
In particular, just blaming 'MBA Management' does little to explain why MBAs appeared in the first place, why they were a preferable alternative to other types of large scale management, and indeed how to avoid relapsing to it over a few years and personnel shifts.
Overall I am afraid this post, while evocative , did not convince me what makes 1517 specifically so different.
by scrlk on 5/11/25, 11:58 PM
> There was a mistaken view that if you just put a lab somewhere, hired a lot of good people, somehow something magical would come out of it for the company, and I didn't believe it. That didn't work. Just doing science in isolation will not in the end, work. [...] It wasn't a good idea just to work on radical things. You can't win on breakthroughs - they're too rare. It just took me years to develop this simple thought: we're always going to work on the in-place technology and make it better, and on the breakthrough technology. [0]
by majormajor on 5/12/25, 12:38 AM
If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too - see OpenAI's work with LLMs based on tech that was comparatively stagnating inside of Google's labs. Especially if nobody remembers Theranos in 50 years. Or you could say that big government-led projects are "obviously" the way to go (moon landing, internet).
On paper, after all, both the "labs" and the VC game are about trying to fund lots of ideas so that the hits pay for the (far greater) number of failures. But they both, after producing some hits, have run into copycat management optimization culture that brings rapid counter-productive risk-aversion. (The university has also done this with publish-or-perish.)
Victims of their own success.
So either: find a new frontier funding source that hasn't seen that cycle yet (it would be ironic if some crypto tycoon started funding a bunch of pure research and that whole bubble led to fundamental breakthroughs after all, hah) or figure out how to break the human desire for control and guaranteed returns.
by LeoPanthera on 5/11/25, 9:45 PM
by porridgeraisin on 5/11/25, 10:37 PM
<paraphrase>
The reason is very simple. There was a big picture motivation: the war, followed by the cold war. Once the big picture motivation wasn't there anymore, that sort of organizational structure(or lack of it) does not work the same way. What ends up happening is what a sibling comment has noted:
> My observation has been that smart people don't want this anymore, at least not within the context of an organization. If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing.
</paraphrase>
You might say, but `grep` wasn't used for war! Correct, but it came up as a side effect of working on much larger endeavours that tied into that bigger picture.
This has been true for most of recent human history. You might know this already, but Fourier was part of most of Napoleon's expeditions, and his work on decomposing waveforms arose out of his work on the "big picture": ballistics.
by kevmo314 on 5/11/25, 10:01 PM
My observation has been that smart people don't want this anymore, at least not within the context of an organization. If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing.
Those that are productive, the smartest who thrive in radical freedom and autonomy, instead choose to work independently. After all, why wouldn't they? If they're putting in the innovation the equity is worth way more than a paycheck.
Unfortunately, that means innovation that requires a Bell Labs isn't as common. Fortunately, one person now can accomplish way more than a 1960's engineer could and the frontier of innovation is much broader than it used to be.
I used to agree with the article's thesis but it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy (if you disagree, <username>@gmail.com). I think it's because those people have outgrown the need for an organization.
by ghaff on 5/11/25, 10:48 PM
A lot of large US tech corporations do have sizable research arms.
Bell Labs is certainly celebrated as part of a telephone monopoly at the time though AT&T actually pulled out of operating system development related to Multics and Unix was pretty much a semi-off-hours project by Ritchie and Thompson.
It's true that you tend not to have such dominant firms as in the past. But companies like Microsoft still have significant research organizations. Maybe head-turning research advancements are harder than they used to be. Don't know. But some large tech firms are still putting lots of money into longer-term advances.
by teleforce on 5/12/25, 2:50 AM
[1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming:
https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
by noosphr on 5/12/25, 8:54 AM
>>You can move to the United States. (We will help with visas.)
This is no longer viable for anyone who isn't already a US citizen. Not sure how serious about investing in individuals that VC is, but from talking to 16 to 22 year olds _none_ of them want to move to the US with ICE deporting students for saying the wrong thing online - or the perception they do. US universities and businesses are suffering from brain drain that unless reversed in the next 3 years will be a drag on the US economy for decades.
by alganet on 5/11/25, 11:12 PM
You start by creating a myth: "this place breeds innovation". Then, ambitious smart people wanting to innovate are drawn to it.
Once there, there are two ways of seeing it: "it was just a myth, I'll slack off and forget about it" or "the myth is worthwhile, I'll make it real".
One mistake could end it all. For example, letting who doesn't believe outnumber or outwit those who "believe the myth".
So, small pieces: A good founding myth (half real, half exaggerated), people willing to make it more real than myth, pruning off who drags the ship down.
Let's take that "productivity" from this myth perspective. Some people will try to game it to slack off, some people will try to make the myth of measuring it into reality (fully knowing it's doomed from the start).
A sustainable power of belief is quite hard to put into a formula. You don't create it, you find it, feed it, prune it, etc. I suspect many proto Bell Labs analogues exist today. Whenever there's one or two people who believe and work hard, there is a chance of making it work. However, the starting seed is not enough by its own.
If you ask me, the free software movement has plenty of supply of it. So many companies realized this already, but can't sequester the myth into another thing (that makes monry), even though free software already makes tons of (non monetary) value.
by nine_k on 5/11/25, 11:07 PM
It feels anti-efficient. It looks wasteful. It requires faith in the power of reason and the creative spirit. All these things are hard to pull off in a public corporation, unless it's swimming in excess cash, like AT&T and Google did back in the day.
Notably, a lot of European science in 16-19 centuries was advanced by well-off people who did not need to earn their upkeep, the useless, idle class, as some said. Truth be told, not all of them advanced sciences and arts though.
OTOH the rational, orderly living, when every minute is filled with some predefined meaning, pre-assigned task, allows very little room for creativity, and gives relatively little incentive to invent new things. Some see it as a noble ideal, and, understandably, a fiscal ideal, too.
Maybe a society needs excess sometimes, needs to burn billions on weird stuff, because it gives a chance to to something genuinely new and revolutionary to be born and grow to a viable stage. In a funny way, the same monopolies that gouge prices for the common person also collect the resources necessary for such advances, that benefit that same common person (but not necessarily that same monopoly). It's an unsetllting thought to have.
by ziofill on 5/12/25, 3:53 AM
by PicassoCTs on 5/12/25, 7:26 AM
by musicale on 5/11/25, 10:14 PM
If Bell Labs let people xplore for multiple years, a few months probably isn't enough time.
by snickmy on 5/12/25, 1:35 PM
by detourdog on 5/11/25, 11:09 PM
by WalterBright on 5/11/25, 10:24 PM
There have been many attempts to replicate the success of the Skunkworks, but they've all failed because the organizers thought they could improve on it.
by motohagiography on 5/12/25, 2:32 AM
the difference with this lab idea and a vc like YC is that vc portfolio companies need products and roadmaps to raise investment and for driving revenue. whereas an asset manager is just investing the money and using the profits to fund engineering research and spinoff product development.
firms like this must already exist, maybe i just never hear about their spinoffs or inventions? if not, maybe a small fund could be acquired to build a research division onto it
by musicale on 5/11/25, 10:01 PM
As the article notes, several companies (Apple, Google, etc.) could (currently) afford to fund such a lab, but there is no way their management and shareholders would approve.
There's a reason for this: research labs seem to benefit competitors as much as (or more than) the companies that fund them. This wasn't an issue for AT&T when it was a monopoly, but it is now. Personally I don't see it as a problem (since one home run innovation could pay for the entire lab) but company managers and shareholders do.
On the other hand, Apple does seem to have a de facto AI lab with a good deal of resource waste, so maybe that's good.
by fsckboy on 5/11/25, 10:26 PM
um... the UK sent the magnetron they had recently invented (1940) to the US in a spirit of wartime cooperation and because their own research and industrial base was already maxed out at the time. pretty sure they sent an owners manual and schematics too. probably even some people?
(magnetrons, for generating microwaves, were the essential component for radar)
by userbinator on 5/11/25, 11:40 PM
by WalterBright on 5/11/25, 10:29 PM
1. find 100 highly motivated scientists and engineers
2. pay them each $1m/year
3. put them in a building
4. see what happens!
by jimnotgym on 5/12/25, 5:37 PM
Reverse[d] engineered with the benefit of the drawings and technical documents! It is not that complicated a device to reverse engineer anyway, the genius step was inventing it.
> invented an acoustic homing torpedo
Co-invented
> proximity fuzes,
They might have got it working effectively, but they didn't invent them
> echo-ranging SONAR,
A scientist on leave from Bell Labs did very important work on an invention from 20 years earlier
> pulse code modulation
Not that either
>the first anti-aircraft missile (the Nike)
The first guided anti-aircraft missile
>and the klystron.
...was invented at Stanford
Not a great article...
by Apocryphon on 5/12/25, 4:06 AM
by YossarianFrPrez on 5/13/25, 5:27 AM
This seems to me to be under-discussed re: Bell Labs.
by johnea on 5/11/25, 10:33 PM
by saboot on 5/12/25, 1:31 AM
Hello? We have 17(!) federally funded national labs, full of scientists doing the work this article waxes nostalgic about. Through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program they afford employee scientists the ability to pursue breakthrough research. However, they are facing major reductions in funding now due to the recent CR and the upcoming congressional budget!