> is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that

A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low margins, they wouldn't have had billions of dollars to spend on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in more competitive sectors have produced any large language models.

> company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research

OpenAI has raised almost $18bn to date [1]. That puts it in the top 10 corporate R&D spenders globally, ahead of Intel and the entirety of big pharma [2]. (And OpenAI's gross margins for its API business are estimated around 40% [3]. Standard fare for tech. If anything, OpenAI subsidising its business with Apple and ChatGPT is behaving more like a tech giant than a start-up.)

The top of that list are the big 5 American tech companies, spending about $200bn annually on R&D. By coincidence, that's roughly the pace of U.S. VC spend [4]. The depth of American private capital markets make a solid case against favouring housing these long-shot bets inside tech giants. (Particularly absent non-compete and IP reform.)

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/openai-raises-6-6b-and-is-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_research_...

[3] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-peek-behind-openai...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ai-deals-lift-us-ve...

Because you specifically mention Alan Kay, I just finished reading “Dealers of Lightning”, which is about PARC, and says that the researchers there were very handsomely paid. IIRC, they were paid 20% more than their counterparts in ‘regular’ Xerox R&D. Xerox was also a big company, making a lot of money when it started PARC; arguably a monopoly (depending on how you define the term).

That still doesn't prove that Kay worked there because of the financial incentives. I don't think that 20% is nearly enough for most top talent to bail to an otherwise less attractive company if they deeply care about what they're working on so long as they aren't wildly underpaid. There needs to be a combination of incentives to drive movement.

I don't know how you could prove or disprove why Kay worked somewhere fifty years ago, short of a written affidavit produced at the time. Additionally, most professionals don't admit that they took a job because of the pay, even if that's exactly why they did it; they usually say they 'went for a new challenge' or something like that.

You could potentially determine it by comparing other companies he could've gone to work for, such as say IBM, and determine their pay in comparison.