That sounds plausible, but is not how it is told in The Idea Factory, where the authors explain that both AT&T (running the phone system) and Western Electric (manufacturing equipment for the phone system) had separate research divisions even before this. They then discovered that they were duplicating a lot of research, so they set up one entity to perform research for both the harder and the softer sides of the communication system.

Citation needed. What I'm seeing: No evidence of a legal requirement to spend a % of revenue on research: There was no line-item mandate in the consent decree forcing AT&T to invest a specific percentage into Bell Labs. The support for research was strategic and reputational: AT&T used Bell Labs to fend off antitrust pressure and maintain regulatory goodwill.

The baby bells actually took with them part of Bell Labs, renamed to Bellcore, that survived for another decade or so. I interned there whilst doing my MSc, it was still a great place for a while, with serious research.

Wikipedia tells me it still exists in some form, albeit under a different name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv

This is all incorrect. The author needs to fact check. Bell labs started in January 1925 and is currently owned by Nokia. The MFJ was in 1984.

my folks worked at at&t when all that happened and so that narrative arc was a big part of my upbringing. my timeline/details is probably off and I can't ask them because they passed away but from what you say here I can totally see what you mean, it totally tracks with the dramas and discussions that they brought home from work every night.

> 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.

Realistically speaking it's also much harder to achieve the same level of impact back then as most, not just low-hanging, fruits have been plucked.

>In particular, just blaming 'MBA Management' does little to explain why MBAs appeared in the first place

Whatever the reason it is definitely not because they are effective managers.

I suspect it's more of a social class phenomenon - they speak the language of the ownership class and that engenders trust.

There's no oversupply, it's decreasing numbers of "preferable" jobs (i.e. tenured professorships) which at least some people previously preferred to industry, inefficient boom-bust cycles in industry, and bad systems for matching work and people. Local minima and kinetic traps are also well-known to exist within the physical sciences, but apparently when we turn to studying societies, we lose this concept and decide that if MBAs exist, we should consider why rather than also whether they are this point preferable to other managers. I say this as a scientist who thinks a lot of my colleagues are intellectually less capable than I expected going in, who is also often shocked by my own stupidity. Scientists who do not make a dramatic impact are also still an integral part of science, Kuhn's ideas come to mind here. By definition, not everyone can be a top-tier researcher.

It will take you 5 minutes to compile (1) Table 1-1 from https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 and (2) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_101.10.a... to see that we produce science PhDs at the same rate we have for decades when normalizing for population. From there, I guess it comes down to considerations of whether the amount of scientific and engineering work as a proportion of total work modern societies need and/or do is going down or not, then whether we expect it should scale with population and/or societal advancement.

Considering the growing complexity of technology, number of productive fields, incoming crises our species faces while we simultaneously turn to more ambitious goals, and the amount of international students doing PhDs, one might actually think we underproduce scientists. Far, far, far more MBAs graduate every year than PhDs.

>there's too many of them to allow judging

Agree with this in particular as a good symptom of the "tectonic shifts". I usually blame the Baumol effect, i.e., the increasing difficulty of the inherently human task: keeping science education/science educators up-to-date. Especially when faced with the returns on optimizing more "mechanical" processes (including the impressive short term returns on "merely" improving bean-counting or, in Bell Lab's/IBM's later eras, shifting info-processing away from paper)

I doubt AI or VCs* have any significant role to play in reducing the friction in the college-to-self-selling-breakthrough pipeline, but they should certainly channel most of their efforts to improving the "ecosystem" first

TFA has right ideas such as

>Make sure people talk to each other every day.

Which already happens here on HN! (Although it's mostly different daily sets of people but.. the same old sets of ideas?)

*Not if the main marketable usecase for college students is to game existing metrics. And I don't see no Edtech in the RFS either

Plus there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" from the war time that was yet to be "productify", as we say today.

Radars, computers (Enigma crushers), lasers, many less visible inventions that had a great impact in say, materials science - those barrels had to be durable, planes lighter and faster, etc this allowed do build fancier stuff. Whole nuclear industry and its surrounding.

Another factor: cold war, there was incentive to spend money if only there was some chance to win some advantage.

> 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.

This is a fairly sweeping anti-science statement without any supporting evidence to back it up. Fairly typical of the HN anti-public research hive mind sadly.

> 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.

The lack of money to fund research isn't god given, it's a feature of capitalism. You get literally trillions of dollars worth of pension funds sloshing around in need for returns - but fundamental research isn't going to directly and imminently make billions of dollars, the timescale for ROI in basic research is usually measured in decades. So all that money went towards social networks, cryptocurrencies, AI or whatever else is promising the greatest ROI - and that can be argued to all be not to the betterment of society, but actually to its detriment.

It used to be the case that the government, mostly via the proxy "military-industrial complex" provided that money - out of that we got GPS, radar, microwaves, lasers, even the Internet itself - to counteract this. Unfortunately, Republican (or in other countries their respective Conservative equivalents) governments have only cut and cut public R&D spending. And now, here we are, with the entirety of the Western economy seeking to become rent-seekers with as little effort as possible...

And billionaires aren't the rescue either. Some of them prefer to spend their money on compensating for ED by engaging in a rat's race of "who has the bigger yacht/sports team", some of them (like Musk) invest on R&D (SpaceX, Tesla) but with a clear focus on personal goals and not necessarily society as a whole, some of them just love to hoard money like dragons in LoTR, and some try to make up for government cuts in social services and foreign development aid (Gates, Soros), but when was the last time you heard a billionaire just devoting even a small sliver of their wealth to basic R&D that doesn't come with expectations attached (like the ones described in TFA's "patronage" section)?

judging potential is an easy thing to do. anyone who works with a trainee for a month can be a fantastic judge of their potential. the problem is, as you allude to, a lack of funding and of jobs

we have a huge oversupply of people credentialed as scientists. a large proportion of them are not sciencing, and quite a few of them are contributing negative science.

> why MBAs appeared in the first place, why they were a preferable alternative to other types of large scale management

This is a whole topic of its own, intertwining with the rise of neoliberalism and short-termist managerial capitalism. I don't think we have to get into that every single time we point out a case where short-termist managerialism fails.

Golden age was a time when basic tinkering could bring you to groundbraking discovery. This is of course over now.

Every breakthrough needs many 'man years' of effort to bring to market. research is good but for every researcher we need several thousand who are doing all the hard work of getting the useful things to market in volumn.

I recently read about Atari attempting to do the same thing in the 1980s (headed by Alan Kay, no less!) Market changes forced them to shut down the attempt a few years later due to lack of funding.

What's the concrete data behind his assertion? I have no doubt he's correct about ideas being rare, but supply/demand laws would then dictate that those ideas are very valuable - if money is what matters to you (I suspect that money wasn't the top priority for Bell labs, but as always lights do need to be kept on).

RCA tried to duplicate Bell Labs' success and it arguably bankrupted the company.

In the end the amazing research work done at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC and (to some degree) IBM Research didn't benefit their benefactors so much as they benefited the industry and arguably the world as a whole.

Which is a specific weakness of the model of capitalism we have moved into in the west during my lifetime -- the gradual defunding or deprecation of state sponsored planning and research means there's little room for improvements that travel across the walls of corporate ownership.

Instead this work is being done on the whole voluntarily in the open source domain, and is likely undercompensated.

Where companies cooperate on cross-company technical standards committees, it's often very painful and the results often dubious.

Who ever said that they should be isolated?

The key differentiator was giving them freedom and putting them in charge, not isolating them.

Eric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-k... came to a similar conclusion. (It did well here just a couple of months ago, too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295865 , so it is a little disappointing that the discussion seems to be starting from the beginning here again.) Another point which you've both made is that other big US firms had very important industrial research labs, too. (RCA Labs is one that seems to get little love these days, at least outside the pages of We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... Also, to be fair, "Areoform" did mention Xerox PARC once in TFA.) Indeed, overstating the uniqueness of Bell Labs helps to billow up the clouds of mystique, but it's probably harmful to a clear understanding of how it actually worked.

But the ultimate problem with TFA is that it seems to be written to portray venture capitalists(?), or at least this group of VCs who totally get it, as on the side of real innovation along with ... Bell Labs researchers(?) and Bell Labs executives(?) ... against the Permanent Managerial Class which has ruined everything. Such ideas have apparently been popular for a while, but I think we can agree that after the past year or two the joke isn't as funny as it used to be anymore.

And yet I can list a lot of things that Bell Labs did that changed the World, and yet I am struggling to name even one that came out of IBM Research. I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying that work didn't resonate as strongly.

> If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too

Well, thing is actually it is kind of horrible. You are basically handing the choice of what to develop where - something that is actually kind of important to society in general in the hands of unelected rich farts that look into making more money. Doesn't help when many of those farts have specific views and projects of society in the future as a technofascist hellscape.

And you could argue the vast majority of what the VC model has given us is scam and services that are very ethically dubious, surveil everyone everywhere, try to squeeze as much money/value out of people, without actually solving many real problems. There is also the thing that the very model is antitethical to solving problems - solving problems costs money, and doesnt bring anything back. Its inherently unprofitable, so any solution is doomed to become more and more enshitified.

Bell Labs had infinite money. Their owners made money every time someone picked up a phone. Not all businesses are that embedded in the society and those that have boards that might like the idea of funding their own labs have to answer to the higher power--the Wall Street crowd, who will force you to optimise for maximum profit in the shortest amount of time. You get there fastest by cutting costs, especially the costs of long-term research that may not bear fruit.

BTW. Why wait 50 years to forget Theranos? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/business/elizabeth-holmes...

So what you’re saying is it will take a war fought by autonomous robots on behalf of two massively wealthy adversarial nations in order to finally get us a robot that can do the dishes?

War is simultaneously the best and worst thing humanity can do. Killing each other is a pointless activity, yet the imminent threat of death and the idea of destroying your enemy is the strongest motivator to work together and accomplish innovative and seemingly impossible tasks.

> If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing

This was addressed in the article

> Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, "what's stopping someone from just slacking off?" Kelly would contend that's the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"

also this hilarious quote from Richard Hamming:

> "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as [Tukey] did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!

This has not been my experience at all. I worked on a team with substantial autonomy and agency for a few years, and most people—not everyone, sure, but almost—naturally rose to the occasion.

People want to do good work and people want to feel like they're doing good work. If you create an environment where they feel trusted and safe, they will rise to your expectations.

I had way more trouble with people working too hard but with misaligned ideas of what "good" meant—and stepping on each other's toes—than with anyone slacking off. It's easy to work around somebody who is merely ineffectual!

And, sure, a bunch of stuff people tried did not work out. But the things that did more than made up for it. Programming and quantitative modeling are inherently high-leverage activities; unless leadership manages out all the leverage in the name of predictability, the hits are going to more than make to for the flubs.

> it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy

Interesting, this is something that I'd love to do! I'm already planning on pursuing custom chip design for molecular simulation, but I don't really want to handle the business side of things. I'd much rather work in a paid lab than get rich and sell it off. Plus, you can do so much more with a team vs being independent.

I was also homeschooled though (unschooling and tjed philosophy) so I've always been picking my own projects. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of generalist researchers comes down to education (another thing I'd love to pursue).

> If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing.

This is 1) untrue, and 2) exactly the kind of cynical "humans-are-untrustworthy" thinking that is one of the reasons why Bell Labs don't exist today.

> After all, why wouldn't they? If they're putting in the innovation the equity is worth way more than a paycheck.

Because not everyone is driven by a need to make tons of money or the promise of a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. If they're well compensated and have enough to live comfortably (and/or care for their family) while being able to use their talents and innovate within their field, that itself is sufficient. This perverted VC-fueled mantra of "I must continually maximize the amount of money I make from my efforts at the expense of all else" is also part of the reason we don't have Bell Labs today.

> it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy (if you disagree ...)

I'm one of those people, but given the thinking that you articulate in your post, I'm not surprised you're unable to hire such people.

“Smart people don’t need organizations anymore.” I get it—going solo is more appealing now than ever. But I can’t help thinking: some things really only happen in a kind of shared magnetic field. Not because you can’t do it alone, but because that moment when another smart person lights you up— that doesn’t happen in solo mode.

Coming at it the other way, someone is intellectually and philosophically free if they choose to be that way, full stop. They bend their neck to the yoke of an organization in order to gain what they could not gain themselves without access to capital.

For a small few, they can access capital and work for equity while themselves being maintained as they work. But I think it's very common that smart people chafe at the restrictions of their organization, not being able to find a more favorable situation.

Hypothetical slackers didn't stop great work from coming out of the lab. I'm not sure why today would be any different.

Hiring smart people who want freedom and autonomy is easy. Just give them freedom, autonomy, stability, and a good enough salary. The hard part is getting them to contribute to your business. Maybe they will contribute if they find it interesting. But if you expect them to contribute, you are clearly not giving them autonomy.

Many of the smartest people I know are good at ignoring bureaucratic requirements, or at least handling them with the minimum effort necessary. And that often includes business, which many of them see as a subcategory of bureaucracy.

Yeah F# and Typescript are very impressive. We just got used to tonnes of innovation. It ain't UNIX but I'd say Typescript is as impressive. An exoskeleton for JS that rivals Haskell.

See also VSCode and WSL.

And if we ain't impressed with LLMs then wtf! I mean maybe it is just nostalga for the old times.

Lots of great stuff is coming out. Quantum computing. Open source revolution producing Tor, Bitcoin, Redis, Linux.

I think we are in the Golden age!

And it is not all from one place. Which is better.

If innovation can be reliably reproduced, it wouldn't be innovation.

All stories about great inventions happen in the same way: being in the right place and the right time under the right circumstances. In other words, you can curate the "right" environment all you want, but you still need quite a bit of luck. And success does not imply it can be repeated.

Btw, the latest round of significant technological advancements came from a monopoly as well. After all it was mostly in Google that AI researchers did most of the pioneering work in AI in recent years.

It makes sense that fundamental advances have become more rare as our cumulative scientific progress grows bigger. In order to contribute something fundamentally new, people have to travel further / climb higher in order to see past what has already been done.

But US tech corps are probably not as free to pursue lines of thinking with no link to financial benefit. Academia is pretty broken. People are generally not free, they are economically bound to think about things more grounded in practical needs. The shackles of the almighty dollar.

So maybe more rare as a function of multiple reasons?

My dad was at this talk in 1986 that PG shares on his blog:

https://paulgraham.com/hamming.html

Said it was amazing.

It's been out of stock for nearly a year. Interesting in a post talking about AT&T and Bell Labs to point out that Stripe struggles to maintain an inventory of niche printed books.

This is what I think the biggest benefit to having a significant UBI. Sure, lots of folks who currently are in “bullshit jobs” would sit around and watch one screen or another but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. Often that something would be amazing.

But lizard brains gotta keep folks under their thumb and horde resources. Alas.

    > 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.

It's not about excess.

Look at some of the most famous success stories in comedy, art, music, theatre, film, etc.

A good number of them did their best work when they were poor.

"Community" is a great example. Best show ever made, hands down. Yet they were all relatively broke and overworked during the whole thing.

It's because they believed in the vision.

To some extent, the NSF did that. My graduate education was funded by the NSF, and my research didn't have an obvious practical purpose, except to enable further research.

Today, I'm in a corporate research role, and I'm still given a lot of freedom. I'm also genuinely interested in practical applications and I like developing things that people want to buy, but my ability to do those things owes a lot to the relatively freewheeling days of NSF funding 30+ years ago.

I know this is going to be an unpopular take, but isn't the idea of socialism that you make a unitary democratic government fill the role of Huge Monopoly Foundation so you can do stuff like fund research labs and be accountable to the public?

This is what I wished academia would be. I'm finishing my PhD and despite loving teaching and research (I've been told I'd make a good professor, including from students) I just don't see the system doing what it should. Truthfully, I'm not aware of any such environment other than maybe a handful of small groups (both in academia and industry).

I think we've become overly metricized. In an effort to reduce waste we created more. Some things are incredibly hard to measure and I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that one of those things is research. Especially low level research. You're pushing the bounds of human knowledge. Creating things that did not previously exist! Not only are there lots of "failures", but how do you measure something that doesn't exist?

I write "failure" in quotes because I don't see it that way, and feel like the common framing of failure is even anti scientific. In science we don't often (or ever) directly prove some result but instead disprove other things and narrow down our options. In the same way every unsuccessful result decreases your search space for understanding where the truth is. But the problem is that the solution space is so large and in such a high dimension that you can't effectively measure this. You're exactly right, it looks like waste. But in an effort to "save money" we created a publish or perish paradigm, which has obviously led to many perverse incentives.

I think the biggest crime is that it severely limits creativity. You can't take on risky or even unpopular ideas because you need to publish and that means passing "peer review". This process is relatively new to science though. It didn't exist in the days of old scientists you reference[0]. The peer review process has always been the open conversation about publications, not the publications themselves nor a few random people reading it who have no interest and every reason to dismiss. Those are just a means to communicate, something that is trivial with today's technologies. We should obviously reject works with plagiarism and obvious factual errors, but there's no reason to not publish the rest. Theres no reason we shouldn't be more open than ever[1]. But we can't do this in a world where we're in competition with another. It only works in a world where we're united by the shared pursuit of more knowledge. Otherwise you "lose credit" or some "edge".

And we're really bad at figuring out what's impactful. Critically, the system makes it hard to make paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift requires a significant rethinking of the current process. It's hard to challenge what we know. It's even harder to convince others. Every major shift we've seen first receives major pushback and that makes it extremely difficult to publish in the current environment. I've heard many times "good luck publishing, even if you can prove it". I've also seen many ideas be put on the infinite back burner because despite being confident in the idea and confident in impact it's known that in the time it'd take to get the necessary results you could have several other works published, which matters far more to your career.

Ironically, I think removing these systems will save more money and create more efficient work (you're exactly right!). We have people dedicating their lives to studying certain topics in depth. The truth is that their curiosity highly aligns with what are critical problems. Sometimes you just know and can't articulate it well until you get a bit more into the problem. I'm sure this is something a lot of people here have experienced when writing programs or elsewhere. There's many things that no one gets why you'd do until after it's done, and frequently many will say it's so obvious after seeing it.

I can tell you that I (and a large number of people) would take massive pay cuts if I could just be paid to do unconditional research. I don't care about money, I care about learning more and solving these hard puzzles.

I'd also make a large wager that this would generate a lot of wealth for a company big enough to do such a program and a lot of value to the world if academia supported this.

(I also do not think the core ideas here are unique to academia. I think we've done similar things in industry. But given the specific topic it makes more sense to discuss the academic side)

[0] I know someone is going to google oldest journal and find an example. The thing is that this was not the normal procedure. Many journals, even in the 20th century, would publish anything void of obvious error.

[1] put on open review. Include code, data, and anything else. Make comments public. Show revisions. Don't let those that plagiarize just silently get rejected and try their luck elsewhere (a surprisingly common problem)

See the picture of Bell Labs, 1966?

Each person, "principal investigator", has a lab which they built.

They only have so much space, and so much budget, but they get a clean slate.

And they're all different. But they all have brilliant ideas they need to work out.

Advantages of doing it like this were proven earlier, and it was still going strong like this in the 1970's.

It was still kind of an academic model.

In these decades there was sometimes special schooling where students were groomed to take their place in this exact lab, starting as pre-teens. Nobody imagined it would ever dwindle in any way.

This is what places like Exxon and DuPont still looked like in 1979 too.

Without being quite an actual monopoly, one thing that's in common is that anything you invent that could be the least bit useful to an employer that size, they can surely afford to make the most of it like few others can.

So the scientists could go wild to a certain extent as long as they were guided by the same "north star" that the org as a whole recognized. Whether it feels like you're getting closer or not, that's the direction you must be drawn to.

You should have seen some of the stuff they built.

Oil companies can have an amazing budget sometimes.

When somebody had a breakthrough, or OTOH scuttled a project or transferred to a different technical center, their lab would be cleared out so a completely different project could get underway with a new investigator building from the ground up. This could take a while, but eventually some very well-equipped labs having outstanding capabilities can develop.

As an entrepreneur, I liked it down in the basement where they would auction off the used gear from about a dozen of those labs at once, after it had sat in storage for a period of time.

After critical mass was achieved, then I had way more fairly current equipment at my immediate disposal than any dozen of my institutional counterparts could benefit from the mainstream way. Turns out I really could get more accomplished and make more progress my own way than if I was actually at a well-funded institution instead. Using equipment they once owned and were successful with to a certain extent, and I usually became only a little bit more advanced, and only some of the time.

Most things are truly the "least bit useful" anyway ;)

That's absolutely true! But we aren't a multi-billion dollar corporation with a war chest in the billions so sadly this is the best we can do. :(

If your needs are known, they are also known to competitors.

I know that Elon Musk is not a popular figure nowadays, but he very correctly stated that competition is for losers, and the real innovators build things that competitors are just unable to copy for a long time, let alone exceed. SpaceX did that. Google, arguably, did that, too, both with their search and their (piecemeal acquired) ad network. Apple did that with iTunes.

Strive to explore the unknown when you can, it may contain yet-unknown lucrative markets.

(There is, of course, an opposite play, the IBM PC play, when you create a market explosion by making a thing open, and enjoy a segment of it, which is larger than the whole market would be if you kept it closed.)

McDonnell's Phantom Works is still running, as a division of Boeing now, and seems to be doing innovative work despite the lack of innovation in the name.

They were responsible for the tailless X-36, the X-37 space plane and, allegedly, much of the groundwork for the winning NGAD design.

How large a fund would you need to sustain employing like a hundred scientists full time?

>> The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

> 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.

Google did set up such a lab. The mission of Google Brain was literally to hire smart people and let them do work on whatever they want. ("Google Brain team members set their own research agenda, with the team as a whole maintaining a portfolio of projects across different time horizons and levels of risk." -- https://research.google.com/teams/brain/). Unsurprisingly, Google Brain is the place that originated the Transformer that powers the current AI craze (and many, many, many other AI innovations).

Interestingly enough, even non-monopoly large corporations once had labs where researchers had a good deal of freedom and where the projects were not required to be directly tied to business objectives. Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu, Sony, NEC, Toshiba, and Hitachi, just to name a few, had labs back in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. As late as the early 2010s, a PhD graduate in computer science had options in industry to do research that wasn’t tied to short-term business priorities.

Unfortunately these opportunities have dried up as companies either got rid of their research labs or shifted the focus of their research labs to be more tied to immediate business needs. Many of my former classmates and colleagues who were industrial researchers are now software engineers, and not due to intentionally changing careers. Academia has become the last bastion of research with fewer commercialization pressures, but academia has its “publish or perish” and fundraising pressures, and now academia is under attack in America right now.

I once worked as a researcher in an industrial lab, but the focus shifted toward more immediate productization rather than exploration. I ended up changing careers; I now teach freshman- and sophomore-level CS courses at a community college. It’s a lot of work during the school year, but I have roughly four months of the year when I could do whatever I want. Looking forward to starting my summer research project once the semester ends in a few weeks!

> 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.

When I was at Apple for several years, there were definitely at least two such groups.

This is why I think we need publicly funded open source projects with paid leads. There are so many basic things we've failed to do for ourselves and our fellow human beings.

For example, the best non-AI TTS system is still Ivona TTS that originated at Blizzard in like 2007. The best open source solution is espeak and it's permanently stuck in 1980... Ivona was bought up by Amazon and now they don't even use the original software, but do charge money per word to use the voice via Amazon Polly. They could open source it, but they don't.

We don't even have something as basic as text to speech freely available, whether you are disabled or not. That is a problem. You have this amazing innovation that still holds to this day, squandered away for nothing.

Why can't we just have an institute that develops these things in the open, for all to use? We clearly all recognize the benefit as SysV tools are still used today! We could have so many amazing things but we don't. It's embarrassing

Google has DeepMind, Microsoft has Microsoft Research, Meta has FAIR.

It’s not trivial to foster such environments, but they do still exist in different forms.

Facebook dumped $60B into an AI universe and HN made fun of them for it.

I'm quoting their research summary. By reverse engineering, it means that they figured out why the magnetron worked and then optimized it. They X-Rayed it, found a deviation from plans, then developed a model to understand why there was a deviation in performance.

    However examples No. 11 and 12 had the number of resonators increased to 8 in order to maximise the efficiency of the valve with the magnetic field provided by the then available permanent magnet, E1189 also incorporated cooling fins to enable the device to be air rather than water cooled. 
    
    Sample No.12 was taken to the USA by E. Bowen with the Tizard mission and upon testing at Bell Labs produced 10 times the power at 5 times the frequency of the best performing American triodes. A certain amount of confusion arose as the drawings taken by Bowen still showed the 6 resonator anode but an X-Ray picture taken at Bell Labs revealed the presence of 8 resonators.
    
    The E1189 or its Navy equivalent NT98 was used in the Naval radar type 271 which was the Allies first operational centimetric radar. The early RCM’s like the E1189 were prone to mode jumping (frequency instability) under pulse conditions and the problem was solved in by means of strapping together alternate segments a process invented by Sayers in 1942. Strapping also considerably increased the magnetron’s efficiency. 

and another account, https://westviewnews.org/2013/08/01/bell-labs-the-war-years/...

In the spirit of wartime cooperation is putting it nicely.

The magnetron was one of several technologies that the UK transferred to the USA in order to secure assistance in the war effort.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission

My guess is not much unless you give them a specific problem, and create a hierarchy.

Otherwise things will just fragment into cliques and fights, like any university department.

To be fair you only need to pay sustenance or opportunity cost so closer to 100k per person should be fine especially outside of USA

The hard part is picking the right people.

Do we think that Bell Labs, if it were to avoid being broken up, would have existed in any way the same way today ?

Cynically, it likely would have ended up a zombie shell of itself, like IBM

Topically, assuming it avoided such a fate and was held in high regard by the industry and employees, this current administration would likely be meddling with every single grant, contract, or project that did not align with the administrations' priorities (see: colleges and research grants)

And Xerox, and IBM went through spits and bumps, IBM Boca Raton, IBM Tully Road. Fairchild. Colombia Physics. The Manhattan project. Princeton. Cornell. Bleachey Park.

From this blog's About page: "In 2010, our team cofounded the Thiel Fellowship with Peter Thiel..."

Make of that what you will.

I was a post doc and applied to an LDRD. It's not a free for all, they, the institution, already knows what topics want to fund and you write your proposal to cater to that. Very similar to tacking "AI" to your pitch these days.

It's an illusion that no-strings-attached funding exists. The government has an agenda and you're free to research anything you want, as long as it is one of the pre-determined topics. It's a very political process.