Sam Altman feels Silicon Valley has lost its innovation culture, saying great research hasn’t happened there in a ‘long time’::“Before OpenAI, what was the last really great scientific breakthrough that came out of a Silicon Valley company?” Altman said on a Wednesday podcast.
Xerox Parc brought us the gui, the copier, Ethernet, and the laser printer. Sometimes private companies in Silicon Valley actually do innovate.
There is truth but also some corporate myth making here. The main elements of the modern GUI was presented during the so-called Mother of all demos by Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart would later work at Parc to make working prototypes of his ideas he already developed at the Stanford Research Institute. Now the corporate side of the history dominates the story. Same with Ethernet, which was an extension of a researcher’s dissertation work. This sort of corporate historical revisionism is exactly what I’m addressing.
Damn, that was an amazing rabbit hole you sent me on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rKUf9DWRI for a quick look at the demo