Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part.

All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society.

We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.

Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project and the societal benefit would be broader and not tied to a single company's market dominance.

Great response. Yes, in some cases concentration may be desirable.

However, I'm not persuaded it was necessary in the specific cases you mention:

* Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations highly in concentrated industries that would suffer disruption by EVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

* TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single company, located in a such a geopolitically sensitive territory?

* 10B-param LLMs: Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance? I'd add that the model that launched the deep learning craze (AlexNet) and the model that launched the LLM craze and (the Transformer) were developed by tiny teams on the cheap.

Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.

Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."

You ask your questions rhetorically as though the answer would be bad if they didn't. None of those really have had a profound good impact on the population at large and it's not clear that they're all that truly impactful in a good way to the population at large. I think we wouldn't notice or care by and large, and it's just because some nerd somewhere is excited for next product is not a good reason for centraliZation.

Reading your first three bullet points I thought you were dreaming about how much better the world could have been.

But your main paragraph following them reads to me like you want Waymo, a powerful TSMC, and huge LLMs.

If there is one thing concentrating power and wealth does it is preferring shorttermism. Growth in the next quarter trumps anything else. Humanity’s ecological niche is suffering long term. Civilization suffers as wealth inequality increases (which concentration of power makes happen).

I would gladly accept a bit of a slow down on progress if it meant my contributions to society were more meaningful. Additionally, I strongly believe this continuous dwindling of small organizations has resulted in an overall loss of community and a sense of belonging. In my opinion, this is what's causing the overall decline in health that we're seeing in developed nations.

For many, life seems aimless. Your future is to simply contribute what you're told to some faceless multinational for which after 20 years your only recognition will be a small piece of canvas with a mass produced screen printed design.

I think the key problem with this idea is taught in basic Microeconomics. A competitive market should have zero profit.

The choice of the government to allow a non competitive market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers, which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the counter argument to “what about Bell Labs” would be that the democratically elected government (in theory) can more efficiently gather that tax and pay for research.

Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just societal benefit.

That's sort of the problem, right? Large organizations have become dominant precisely because of reasons like this, and there are indeed huge benefits. But if the hypothesis is correct that the crowding out of smaller organizations is fraying the fabric of society, that's a pretty significant drawback.

Sure, as long as they're not too big to fail. Those big banks should've gone bankrupt in 2008. They didn't because the taxpayer backstopped it.

That is precisely the moral hazard we're now living with. Become so big that you can't fail and can't be disciplined.

It's not clear to me that anything of value would have been lost in this counterfactual world.

All those things could still happen if private enterprises pooled their resources and did R&D together. This is already routinely happening in the car industry, where companies band together to develop new engines, to make the R&D expense hurt less.

You're talking about large-scale hyperexpensive infrastructure research projects with uncertain payouts, which is something that the state already excels at. Public grants are responsible for bankrolling an enormous amount of the research that gets done, and infrastructure projects are money-sinks with a very long timescale. I don't really see how this is an argument functions in favour of big corporations and against big government.

Probably the best statement for "biggering up", at least in the case of Africa, was made in a recent editorial in The Economist

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2025/01/06/africa-h...

https://archive.ph/j5CJY

Not a single one of those projects is preferable to a more equitable society. Maybe self driving, yes, but the impact of AI is highly dubious and uncertain at this point in time.

I'm not convinced LLMs are a net positive. They've been compared to railroads. Show me the new commerce brought about by LLM trains.

Self Driving cars are very much unproven, and without google people would still be working on them. And so far its not clear that this investment was worth it.

TSMC had many costumers willing to buy new chips.

But I agree, sometimes, larger companies very much do make sense.

Bell labs also sat on a lot of tech that didn't align w/ their business

I'm really not sure the answer to any of these is "we would be worse off", let alone would someone be able to raise the funds.

Did we have more telecom innovation when Bell was huge or after that?

Then at worst progress on those would be slower.

At best we would have less monopolistic global powers trying to rent us everyone of our freedoms

* assuming that we actually need all these technological advancements

I would compare "larger businesses" with "socialistic planning system" while "smaller businesses" with "free market economy". There are examples when centralized planning got good results - NASA's Apollo project is an example. There are also examples when market economy - eventually, in the long term, not short - prevailed: the Cold War is an example here.

It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.

> - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?

TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer.

Sure, without this investment the pace of development wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely the same, only somewhat slower.

Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?

All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority.

We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and misinformation.

Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not faster.

>- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?

Would anyone even be calling for those, if their core purpose wasn't to facilitate the concentration of capital?