I use to believe that the business model of Microsoft was just selling an overpriced Operating System and Microsoft Office to governments and businesses. I used to believe that the business model of Google was gathering data and selling accurate ads.

I was recently surprised to discover they have research subsidiaries called Microsoft Research and Google Deepmind

Microsoft Research employs more than 1,000 computer scientists, physicists, engineers, and mathematicians, including Turing Award winners, Fields Medal winners, MacArthur Fellows, and Dijkstra Prize winners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind

The founder of Deep Mind received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

Do they do actual research here or is this junk science?

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    4·
    4 hours ago

    Sure. Why wouldn’t they?

    I mean, some research isn’t very amenable to near-term use.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_skies_research

    Blue skies research, also called blue sky science, is scientific research in domains where “real-world” applications are not immediately apparent. It has been defined as “research without a clear goal”[1] and “curiosity-driven science”.

    That’s harder to justify, hard to make a return on. For very long-term research, maybe you have an easier time with governments doing research.

    But if you can produce valuable intellectual property that they can use, sure, businesses will hire you to produce stuff for their business. I guarantee you that businesses are going to be funding a whole lot of AI research right now, for example: what breakthroughs happen there will have enormous impact on things like whether or not OpenAI’s investments to get an early lead in hardware and datacenters pay off.

    My own experience in private-sector research is that there’s a fuzzier line between research and development than you might think. That is, a company might want to have people in their labs directly facilitate research turning into product that can come to market.

    But if you go out and look at, say, patent applications, you’ll find immense numbers filed by companies.

    searches

    Some numbers to support the above:

    https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/updates/new-report-shows-business-rd-funding-dominates-us-rd

    The United States is the largest performer of research and experimental development (R&D), with $806 billion in gross domestic expenditures on R&D in 2021, followed by China, with $668 billion. While overall funding of R&D in the U.S. continues to rise rapidly, the share of basic research funded by the federal government has fallen in the previous decade. Business funding of U.S. R&D surpassed federal funding in the 1980s and now dominates the U.S. R&D enterprise.

    The business sector is by far the largest performer of U.S. R&D, performing an estimated $693 billion in 2022, or 78% of U.S. R&D. Nearly 80% of business investment is in experimental development – the stage when the promise of near-term commercial benefit is real.