Quick thoughts on research.
Universities are centuries-old institutions. Oxford has been teaching since 1096, the University of Paris was founded around 1150, and Bologna — often considered the oldest university — dates back to 1088. But research and science are not the same as universities and academia. And often, progress did not happen at university. Today, universities are huge bureaucratic apparatus. Individual researchers are restricted in many ways, and have many non-research duties.
Two Points for Impactful Research
Max Perutz, who led an incredibly successful research unit that produced nine Nobel Prizes, was described this way in his obituary in the Guardian:
"Impishly, whenever he was asked whether there are simple guidelines along which to organize research so that it would be highly creative, he would say: no politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews; just gifted, highly motivated people picked by a few men of good judgement."
Do universities live up to that ideal?
Richard Hamming offers another point of evaluation for what good research for progress looks like. His famous questions to fellow researchers was: "What are the most important problems in your field?" and "Why aren't you working on them?". Here is an excerpt from his "You and your research" talk in 1986:
"Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring."
Consequently ...
Considering these two Touchstones, universities today face some problems. Obviously, they are still important. But what alternative orgs do meaningful work? Google with DeepMind is one prominent case. They have released models like AlphaFold, AlphaGo, and AlphaZero. Their contribution to scientific progress is undeniable. Are they the modern equivalent of Bell Labs? Another is Arc Institute. Or Future House. Both are dynamic and live players, trying to solve the most important and urgent problems by giving researchers freedom and support. The advancement of AGI is at this point more dependent on the research labs from OpenAI, Anthropic and others, than on any single University.
Obviously, one should not look at the Universities alone. Most technological breakthroughs that happened in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States came from the military-university-industry trio. This is a strategy that China today seems to have embraced. Contrast this with the situation in Germany:
After World War II, Germany drew almost the opposite lesson. Ashamed of its militaristic past, the country treated any collaboration between universities and the military as ethically suspect. The Bundeswehr was kept at arms length, and by the 1980s many universities - starting with Bremen in 1986 - had passed Zivilklauseln; Civil clauses that forbid research intended for military use. Today, these clauses are debated again, and many universities have abandoned them. The deep self-distrust was a luxury belief; In todays world, where geopolitical conflicts rise again, it is one that Germany can not afford anymore.