The CED: RCA's Very Late, Very Weird Video Gamble (Pt. 1)

I've gotten a lot more out of studying failures. Especially other people's failures. People who are honest with themselves can warn you around the mistakes they made, but people who succeed rarely have much luck identifying which selection of choices got them there. I think the reason is that success is usually cumulative: each little win builds on the last until it's obvious you're going in the right direction. Those wins often depend on random or temporary things you have little control over. For example: CED was the perfect format for the decade RCA started developing it in, but it took until VHS redefined the market to finish it.[0] Meanwhile one mistake can send everything tumbling down. Study enough mistakes and you might know enough of what to avoid to stay afloat long enough to find the right chain of wins. [0] [this video]

There's an interesting history behind the RCA CED (Capacitance Electronic Disk), an attempt to put video on vinyl. While the full history behind it's failure is complicated, a large factor was the differing priorities between research and other departments that delayed the product by several years. [link] [this video] Considering some of the other comments about merging two AI departments together (DeepMind and Brain) and injecting more bureaucracy into DeepMind, it seems to have some parallels with the story of the RCA CED. You can't just let researchers do research. There needs to be a clear goal/priority that this research can eventually be converted into a profitable product or service. Otherwise, the researchers will continue to work on "cool projects" and publishing papers with their name on them, with little consideration given to how to monetize this research. Personally, I'm not a fan of this AI gold rush trying to inject AI into everything. It's just interesting to ponder.