Magic Leap sits closer to Theranos in my view but agree otherwise

Magic leap delivered AR glasses running SLAM. It over sold on the market for it, didnt lie about whether it would work and didn’t test on patients looking for medicial care. You sound very uninformed. Theranos founders are serving prison sentences. Big Difference.

Meta has the financial oomph to run multiple Bell Labs within its organization.

Why they decided not to do that is kind of a puzzle.

because the business hierarchy clearly couldnt support it. take that for what you will.

as I understand, Bell Labs mandate was to improve the network, which had tons of great threads to pull on: plastics for handsets, transistors for amplification, information theory for capacity on fixed copper.

Google and Meta are ads businesses with a lot less surface area for such a mandate to have similar impact and, frankly, exciting projects people want to do.

Meanwhile they still have tons of cash so, why not, throw money at solving Atari or other shiny programs.

Also, for cultural reasons, there’s been a huge shift to expensive monolithic “moonshot programs” whose expenses need on-demand progress to justify and are simply slower and way less innovative.

3 passionate designers hiding deep inside Apple can side hustle up the key gestures that make multi touch baked enough to see a path to an iPhone - long before iPhone was any sort endgame direction they were being managed to.

Innovation thrives on lots of small teams mostly failing in the search for something worth doubling down on.

Googles et al have a new approach - aim for the moon, budget and staff for the moon, then burn cash while no one ever really polished up the fundamental enabling pieces in hindsight they needed to succeed

It's very hard (and almost irreconcilable) to lead both Applied Research -- that optimizes for product/business outcomes -- and Fundamental Research -- that optimizes for novel ideas -- especially at the scale of Meta.

LeCun had chosen to focus on the latter. He can't be blamed for not having taken the second hat.

Yes he can. If he wanted to focus on fundamental research he shouldn’t have accepted a leadership position at a product company. He knew going in that releasing products was part of his job and largely blew it.

Like people were not feeling the pain in the first half of the XXth century when we decided to own our nuclear stack? It's a matter of political courage.

Savvy researchers/engineers have an opportunity to arbitrage here: working without LLMs on something hard leads to better outcome than what your "AI-enabled" peers achieve (after all, Karpathy could not resort on any AI to build nano-chat). It's sad state of affairs, but it really is there.

Isn’t the moat in the product/UI/UX? I use Claude daily and love the “scratch notebook” feel of it. The barebone model does not get you any of this.

I agree that the scaffolding around the model contributes greatly to the experience. But it doesn't take billions of dollars in GPUs to do that part.

Has anyone tried running this on a 5090 or 6000 pro? What throughput do you see?

Note that Stripe had followed that path already.

They had 50 users after two years.

Though, conversely, Stripe was money-losing for the first 15 years of its existence.

To be fair, MSFT is likely making a ton of money (or more likely, preventing churn) with their GPT-powered products for the enterprise.

So the math is probably harder than it seems.

Would be totally a guess since as mentioned, they are not being too forth coming. But chances are, the inclusion of GPT into the products probably did not make those products any more profitable than before, and just make them more expensive to run. Everyone who would buy Sharepoint/dynamics 365 already has it. I doubt they saw a massive influx to the user base of these tools due to GPT. Have you heard of a massive influx of new Windows license being bought because og co-pilot? No, its just the normal churn of people upgrading their machines they were probably gonna upgrade soon anyways.

The exception might be Azure with their LLM services.

Nobody really knows, they hide Copilot inside each of the business units and then claim it's too hard to split out.

> I built and shipped a working version in a day.

If I were an engineer working under a CTO doing this, I’d find it extremely demotivating.

Why, as a CTO, are you not setting things up so that I can do it instead?