Bell Labs: The Invention of Research

Bell Labs: The Invention of Research

Countless articles and books exist about the contributions of Bell Labs to many of the technologies commonplace today. From the transistor to satellites to the personal computer, the list of inventions the Labs developed between its run from the 1930’s to 80’s dwarfs that of any academic or industrial lab in history. Less research exists however, of its contributions to data analysis and how research teams operate with an attention to “interdisciplinarity,” trust, and openness.¹

By all accounts, Bell Labs advanced how to perform analysis. Researchers like Claude Shannon developed information theory, laying the groundwork for all modern digital communication. As Vicki Boykis recently described, “the most efficient way to inspect information was to not look at the actual data, but to analyze the statistical properties of that message”² not unlike how we analyze the metadata of today’s digital products. Later, Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie invented a computer time-sharing method which evolved into the UNIX operating system. As a byproduct, the Labs developed the theoretical framework for cloud computing. Yann LeCun, who would later become Chief AI Scientist at Meta, developed machine learning and image recognition methods in the 1980’s at Bell Labs too.³ Through its decades of research, these contributions became instrumental to the discipline of data analysis.'

Interdisciplinarity

Beyond its technological inventions and contributions to pure science though, Bell Labs invented modern research. The Solid State team, which invented the transistor in the 1950’s for example, were among the first industrial laboratories to adopt the concept of interdisciplinary research. Mervin Kelly, one of the Labs’ managers at the time, “believed the most valuable ideas arose when the large group of physicists bumped against other departments and disciplines too.” As one academic later noted, “it’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science and the interface between many disciplines that creates new ideas.”¹

Trust

The Labs also fostered an “atmosphere of autonomy [with] a web of human connections . . . people who trusted each other [and] depended on the expertise of others.”¹ As 1970’s researcher described it, there were "really good people doing really interesting things, and nobody telling you what to do.”⁴ Not to mention that the telephone system monopoly AT&T enjoyed offered the Labs wide latitude to embark on multi-year projects which often failed. Historian Michael Riordan called it “a built-in ‘R&D tax’ on telephone service.”⁵

Openness

Openness was maybe not the Labs’ focus for its work with the government during WWII and the Cold War, but it later became known for its openness. The UNIX project called its approach “ego-less programming.”⁴ The method of sharing code across team-members can be seen as a precursor to version control methods used in Git. In a later admission, one of the lead developers on the project admitted to leaving a vulnerability in one compiler, joking that “you can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)”⁶ . Even today, Yann LeCun has continued advocating for Meta to open-source today’s generative artificial intelligence models which he first began working on at Bell Labs. As he recently said, the the models are “going to become a basic infrastructure that everybody is going to use, it has to be open.”⁷

In the end, The Labs’ source of strength became its undoing. AT&T’s monopoly on the telephone market, which allowed the Labs wide latitude to subsidize years-long research initiatives, drew the ire of federal regulators. The monopoly broke up, and Bell Labs never looked the same again.⁶

Bell Labs’ technological inventions and advancements in pure science revolutionized how researchers work. Perhaps more notable though, were its innovations to how researchers work together - by building cross-functional teams with a high degree of latitude, trust, and a bend toward openness.

Citations

1. Isaacson, W. (2012). The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

2. Boykis, V. (2024, January 15). What's new with ML in production? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://vickiboykis.com/2024/01/15/whats-new-with-ml-in-production/

3. LeCun, Y. (2017, February 17). Predictive Learning: The Next Frontier in AI. Bell Labs. Retrieved from https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/yann-lecun-predictive-learning-next-frontier-ai-february-17-2017/#gref

4. TED. (2014, April). The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFK6RG47bww

5. Stone, A. (2019, February 20). The End of AT&T. IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-end-of-att

6. Thompson, K. (1984). Reflections on Trusting Trust. Retrieved from https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf

7. Haque, U. (2023). Forget ChatGPT, Why Llama and Open Source AI Will Win in 2023. VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/ai/forget-chatgpt-why-llama-and-open-source-ai-win-2023/