We're doing this because funding and the environment for fundamental research keep getting worse. The government cuts science funding every year, academia is badly broken in many ways, and corporate research is not open enough, or too directed toward what that company needs. —

Sam Altman on the launch of Y Combinator’s new research lab.

This is noble but scary. It might provide an alternative to explicitly for-profit research in the face of decline in support for public research, but it is privatizing in its own right. This sort of effort might permit such decline even further…