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Back then we had industry research labs. There was Bell Labs, the Frythe, DuPont Experimental Station, BASF's Zentralforschung, and nowadays we have the 737-MAX.

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There are still a bunch of industry research labs. Here's a currated list of just those doing computer science research:

https://cra.org/cra-wp/research-labs/

Just because Boeing sucks these days doesn't mean there isn't good research happening in industry.

I wonder how accurate that list is now. I see Twitter listed and I assume they have stopped doing CS research.

Good catch. They definitely went the way of Boeing -- more interest in pocket lining than research. I do wonder if it went to zero or just a major scale back.

They are doing some AI research, considering their Grok LLM.

And to what extent are those labs doing the same kind of fundamental research that Bell Labs was doing back in the day?

Sure, they wanted to produce things that Ma Bell could monetize—but it was abundantly clear that they were not being micromanaged to that effect. Today, at least from the outside, it seems like any industry-funded research is cut off the moment it looks like it's not going to produce a clearly-profitable product or service within the next few years.

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