Who Does AI? Academia? Nope. Government Research Centers? Nope. Who Then?
April 7, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Smart software is the domain of commercial enterprises. How would these questions be answered in China? Differently I would suggest.
“AI Is Entering an Era of Corporate Control” cites a report from Stanford University (an institution whose president did some alleged Fancy Dancing in research data) to substantiate the observation. I noted this passage:
The AI Index states that, for many years, academia led the way in developing state-of-the-art AI systems, but industry has now firmly taken over. “In 2022, there were 32 significant industry-produced machine learning models compared to just three produced by academia…
Interesting. Innovation, however, seems to have drained from the Ivory Towers (now in the student loan business) and Federal research labs (now in the marketing their achievements to obtain more US government funding). These two slices of smart people are not performing when it comes to smart software.
The source article does not dwell on these innovation laggards. Instead I learn that AI investment is decreasing and that running AI models kills whales and snail darters.
For me, the main issue is, “Why is there a paucity of smart software in US universities and national laboratories? Heck, let’s toss in DARPA too.” I think it is easy to point to the commercial moves of OpenAI, the marketing of Microsoft, and the foibles of the Sundar and Prabhakar Comedy Show. In fact, the role of big companies is obvious. Was a research report needed? A tweet would have handled the topic for me.
I wonder what structural friction is inhibiting universities and outfits like LANL, ORNL, and Sandia, among others.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2023
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