“Companies have repeatedly been the institutions capable of building and deploying general-purpose technologies that improve society at scale.”

Have they, though? It seems that you’re collapsing the innovation pipeline (basic research → prototype → scaling → diffusion) into a single stage and then crediting that entire chain to “companies.”

I agree that companies are uniquely suited to scaling and diffusing general purpose technologies, but the building part seems to ignore how much of the innovations that companies scale started in government, military, publicly funded labs.