Machine Nirvana: How GE Is Using AI to Build A Powerhouse Of Knowledge - GE Reports

GE was still essentially a startup when its managers hired young MIT chemistry professor Willis Whitney to open the company's first laboratory in 1900. Unlike Thomas Edison's Menlo Park "invention factory" in New Jersey, the place was a modest affair. It was located in a wooden barn behind the house of GE's resident polymath and engineering wizard Charles Steinmetz in Schenectady, New York, where GE co-founder Edison moved in the 1880s. The lab -- dedicated to "fundamental research" -- went up in flames the next spring, but Whitney's career and momentum continued. He rebuilt the lab and brought in researchers such as Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir.