People call these companies labs due to some combination of marketing and historical accident. To my knowledge no one ever called Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Netflix “labs”, despite each of them employing many researchers and pushing a lot of genuine innovation in many fields of technology.
I agree overall but fwiw I think that for the first few years of Open AI and Deepmind’s existence, they were mostly pursuing blue sky research with few obvious nearby commercial applications (e.g. training NNs to play video games). I think a lab was a pretty reasonable term—or at least similarly reasonable to calling say, bell labs a lab.
My point was that I don’t think it was marketing or a historical accident, and it’s actually quite different to the other companies that you named which were all just straightforward revenue generating companies from ~day 1.
Ah! Yes that’s a good point and I misinterpreted.That’s part of what I meant by “historical accident” but now I think that it was confusing to say “accident” and I should have said something like “hisotrical activities”.
I agree overall but fwiw I think that for the first few years of Open AI and Deepmind’s existence, they were mostly pursuing blue sky research with few obvious nearby commercial applications (e.g. training NNs to play video games). I think a lab was a pretty reasonable term—or at least similarly reasonable to calling say, bell labs a lab.
I completely agree that OpenAI and Deepmind started out as labs and are no longer so.
My point was that I don’t think it was marketing or a historical accident, and it’s actually quite different to the other companies that you named which were all just straightforward revenue generating companies from ~day 1.
Ah! Yes that’s a good point and I misinterpreted.That’s part of what I meant by “historical accident” but now I think that it was confusing to say “accident” and I should have said something like “hisotrical activities”.