They rise with the tide of AI adoption. But they gain ground if people opt into Google solutions. And any token sent to a Google model (free or paid) actively punishes their competitors that are then required to spend vast sums to remain bleeding edge.

You'll find that most internal "innovation" teams are just lip service. In most cases, the "mothership" will be incapable of reproducing true innovation -- from a statistical perspective, culture perspective (mega corps are anti-scrappy; internal politics), and motivation perspective (startups aren't 9-to-5). It's much easier to have big M&A budgets, a VC arm, and some handwavvy internal innovation group.

Every now and again, you'll get real innovations (Waymo, transistors, GUIs), but even those have a spotty track record of commercialization when created internally.

Maybe universities, tenure committees, and funding sources should stop measuring academics by vanity metrics such as H-Index and publication counts. And don't get me started on the tendency toward "minimum publishable units."

That said, abusing power as an editor deserves a special place in hell...

They did crowdfunding via Wefunder, so their financial docs performance is available online: https://wefunder.com/whiteclouds

They seem to have found some high-margin value-add niches in doing large signs, tradeshow displays, topographical maps, etc. Seems like there can be some nice SMB opportunities in the space if you can carve out some specialty services & attract repeat customers.

I'm sure China could find some judges to rule in the name of national security if it would give everyone warm fuzzies.

Judicial checks and balances only function when they're independent of the executive and parliament

Unless you are a Claude Shannon type, adding fundamental new knowledge to humanity's corpus is generally actually hard - at least in science & engineering. If you feel differently, I look forward to reading your groundbreaking papers!

Spoken like someone who never went through grad school at a competitive R1 program

It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. It's about the same for professors too.

We already paid our dues by helping peer review (for free) a half dozen papers for each one we submitted. Why should we be expected to review random papers on arxiv too...?