Awesome piece Kyle! The one place I'd be curious to push on is the dismissal of Google given, by your own three rules, it may be the closest thing the US actually produced: ad auction rents paid for genuinely open-ended research, the TPU and the data center fleet seem to be a real Western Electric comp, and the value leaked outward almost exactly the way the 1956 consent decree forced Bell's to (MapReduce became Hadoop, Borg became Kubernetes, and the transformer paper underpinned OpenAI and Anthropic). This of course expands and becomes more nuanced when you include other ancillary areas like Everyday Robots which folded in Deepmind (notably an acquisition) but which is foundational in the developmental of the physical world including RT-1, RT-2, and Open-X Embodiment. That's not to even mention Waymo or the many other less household named projects within GoogleX / Moonshot Factory (e.g., Loon, Tapestry, Dandelion).
It took me two goes to get this one, but finally it clicked. What clicked was how the story you were telling was similar to the story I just told of two companies chasing a general-purpose technology when they have the space to expand and yet still fiercely compete.
What a fantastic read and what we are trying to build/rectify at Cultivarium.
Awesome piece Kyle! The one place I'd be curious to push on is the dismissal of Google given, by your own three rules, it may be the closest thing the US actually produced: ad auction rents paid for genuinely open-ended research, the TPU and the data center fleet seem to be a real Western Electric comp, and the value leaked outward almost exactly the way the 1956 consent decree forced Bell's to (MapReduce became Hadoop, Borg became Kubernetes, and the transformer paper underpinned OpenAI and Anthropic). This of course expands and becomes more nuanced when you include other ancillary areas like Everyday Robots which folded in Deepmind (notably an acquisition) but which is foundational in the developmental of the physical world including RT-1, RT-2, and Open-X Embodiment. That's not to even mention Waymo or the many other less household named projects within GoogleX / Moonshot Factory (e.g., Loon, Tapestry, Dandelion).
This room’s existence is one of the reasons conscription countries (Korea, Taiwan, Finland, Sizerland, Israel) do so well in technology.
It took me two goes to get this one, but finally it clicked. What clicked was how the story you were telling was similar to the story I just told of two companies chasing a general-purpose technology when they have the space to expand and yet still fiercely compete.
https://capabilitybrown.substack.com/p/abb-the-hidden-infrastructure-behind
If you want the counterfactual of what GE could have been. Then this is it!