I have been shorting most of the Quantum Computing startups for about a year. They have been printing. Missed out on Fusion! (?)

Real research has always been long term as well as heavy manufacturing. It requires long-term planning with long-term budget, which is hard to get when money is expensive.

There’s actually a bizarre irony.

Remember Bell labs, XEROX parc? Ask yourself why that existed and why research came out of them.

Monopoly.

So - many people don’t want to admit this but monopolies can be good from an R&D perspective, but without strong oversight by regulators - money will instead spent on R&D projects that specifically raise entry barriers.

[delayed]

> Anyway, you cannot have both monopolies and strong regulators...

> Monopolies occur because regulation doesn't exist or is captured.

IMO, the stronger the regulator, the stronger the incentive to capture it.

Unless by "strong" you mean "competent"?

I meant competent, but regulator strength in the way you're implying at its limit becomes monopolistic itself. So when I speak of regulation strength with respect to monopoly, I am speaking to the ability of a regulator to effectively both understand their duty and carry it out.

Agreed. I used to be an industrial researcher at one of the last companies that didn’t require their researchers to think of short-term productization goals. However, things changed at my former company, and I ended up leaving for a tenure-track position at a community college.

I don’t know what industrial research in CS is like in the era of agentic coding. On one hand I suppose building prototypes is faster than ever, but on the other hand I genuinely don’t know how well LLMs do with harder programming tasks. It’s one thing to have an agent work on a CRUD app, but I wonder how effective agents are at handling things like parallelism, distributed computing, load-balancing, and other topics that are harder to write than the average CRUD app. I am also aware of efforts such as Sakana AI’s automated scientific discovery research, and I wonder if many of the incremental, short-term research topics many companies pursue can be automated.

I’m a bit pessimistic about the state of research these days, from funding to publish-or-perish to the effects of generative AI (automation, AI slop publications, AI slop reviews). Then again, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, and maybe things are better than I think.