You have to be willing to not have things guaranteed to "work." Don't just look at the best case. Investigate and discuss how many versions of Bell Labs didn't "work."
If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too - see OpenAI's work with LLMs based on tech that was comparatively stagnating inside of Google's labs. Especially if nobody remembers Theranos in 50 years. Or you could say that big government-led projects are "obviously" the way to go (moon landing, internet).
On paper, after all, both the "labs" and the VC game are about trying to fund lots of ideas so that the hits pay for the (far greater) number of failures. But they both, after producing some hits, have run into copycat management optimization culture that brings rapid counter-productive risk-aversion. (The university has also done this with publish-or-perish.)
Victims of their own success.
So either: find a new frontier funding source that hasn't seen that cycle yet (it would be ironic if some crypto tycoon started funding a bunch of pure research and that whole bubble led to fundamental breakthroughs after all, hah) or figure out how to break the human desire for control and guaranteed returns.
> If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too
Well, thing is actually it is kind of horrible. You are basically handing the choice of what to develop where - something that is actually kind of important to society in general in the hands of unelected rich farts that look into making more money. Doesn't help when many of those farts have specific views and projects of society in the future as a technofascist hellscape.
And you could argue the vast majority of what the VC model has given us is scam and services that are very ethically dubious, surveil everyone everywhere, try to squeeze as much money/value out of people, without actually solving many real problems. There is also the thing that the very model is antitethical to solving problems - solving problems costs money, and doesnt bring anything back. Its inherently unprofitable, so any solution is doomed to become more and more enshitified.
Bell Labs had infinite money. Their owners made money every time someone picked up a phone. Not all businesses are that embedded in the society and those that have boards that might like the idea of funding their own labs have to answer to the higher power--the Wall Street crowd, who will force you to optimise for maximum profit in the shortest amount of time. You get there fastest by cutting costs, especially the costs of long-term research that may not bear fruit.
If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too - see OpenAI's work with LLMs based on tech that was comparatively stagnating inside of Google's labs. Especially if nobody remembers Theranos in 50 years. Or you could say that big government-led projects are "obviously" the way to go (moon landing, internet).
On paper, after all, both the "labs" and the VC game are about trying to fund lots of ideas so that the hits pay for the (far greater) number of failures. But they both, after producing some hits, have run into copycat management optimization culture that brings rapid counter-productive risk-aversion. (The university has also done this with publish-or-perish.)
Victims of their own success.
So either: find a new frontier funding source that hasn't seen that cycle yet (it would be ironic if some crypto tycoon started funding a bunch of pure research and that whole bubble led to fundamental breakthroughs after all, hah) or figure out how to break the human desire for control and guaranteed returns.