I mean, credit where credit is due. Google employs some of the greatest names in artificial intelligence and the DeepMind team had a huge chunk of them working on this problem. While the resources may have been available, I don’t think any other single institution had the level of brain power.
It also makes one reconsider the notion that monopolies are entirely bad. This essentially appears to be a vanity project for Google. Though of course they'll benefit from it in many ways, but it's not like they're doing this as the core product of their service. It's a pretty awesome achievement.
Look at all of the incredible things that came out of Bell labs during their monopolistic reign. I think a better way to put it is not all monopolies are bad for research and progress but many are bad for other social and economic reasons. Like any position of power, it depends on how it is used snd who is using it.
> It also makes one reconsider the notion that monopolies are entirely bad.
Much like political dictators, they can be exceedingly efficient and have resources (and authority) to do things in spite of opposing interests.
People who faced with the narrative that countries have a monopoly on a number of aspects of life find monopolies are not a BAD THING(tm), but that they are bad for a consumer market - as a monopoly eventually blockades aspects of the market.
I think there's some merit to the idea that huge corporate monopolies have the resources to accomplish undertakings that smaller companies cannot. But it's often a what-if, because we don't know what the alternative might have been.
Big companies can suck up all the air in the room by monopolizing talent and making it harder for startups to pay the kinds of salaries needed for top tier AI research. Xerox PARC came up with all kinds of groundbreaking inventions that were never commercialized (by them). For every invention that comes out of a big company, it's worth thinking about whether it might have actually come out faster if it was borne of competition instead of a side project. Or in the grand scheme of things, if corporate taxes were higher and the money was given to a university research lab.
I think the best results may come from the middle ground. Smaller/medium companies are so worried about staying afloat or hitting their quarterly earnings that they have trouble making long term investments. Large companies are diverse and profitable enough that they can afford to blow money on things that might not pan out, but they don't have the same drive -- and in fact have some pressure to avoid being "too" innovative because it could cannibalize their existing products.
It's kind of like a modern day Bell Labs where they have so much excess profit from adtech that they can fund lots of "basic research" or the computer science equivalent of that.
You've just describe why many Socialists 100 years were very skeptical of anti-trust as trying to sacrifice modernity to proper up a romanticized notion of the past as disaggregated pure-petit-bourgeois capitalism. Really not that different than the critism of the Luddites 100 years before that.
This line of argument reminds me of Haldane's point that economic planning can often work for the same reasons why large corporations and monopolies often work well too.
Imagine we lived in a culture that did not believe "government is always bad at everything". Government could then pay Google-level salaries and provide Google-level resources to the top minds in the world and give them free rein to tackle problems like this. It's worked in the past, such as Manhattan project or moon landing. But I don't think it's doable nowadays because of the anti-government political culture. Even when government is fully funding things these days the work has to be farmed out to private interests.
It'll take more than just belief in the government. We'd need people to actually care about making government better.
Most people just show up to vote once every 4 years (or less) and make their decision based on the party affiliation or the wedge issue du jour, and the rest of the time pretty much ignore what's going on or don't have the power to do anything about it, which gives a lot of leeway for special interests to slide things in under the radar.
Not even a little bit. There is nothing here that would require Google to be a monopoly to accomplish. If anything companies become lazy without competition.
I feel like that is not too far from saying it makes one reconsider communism because good things can happen with authoritarian control.
Absolutely. The capability to "create" the breakthrough is extremely rare. Perhaps only DeepMind, OpenAI, and GoogleBrain can assemble these types of teams. Luckily, the capability to replicate and exploit the breakthrough is far more 'common'; though still very rare.
Excited to see how follow on use of these models, by many more teams, researchers, and companies plays out over the next two decades.
