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Comment by karmakurtisaani | Hacker News Reader

A PhD student I recently talked to was complaining how in academia they will never have the resources it takes to train models like GPT. And how now some academics are only researching the input/outputs to these LLMs. Seems like it's pretty dire or at least uninspiring to all but very few at the moment.

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why is that? don't like those academic particle researchers get tons of money to build wild experiments to measure waves or collide particles? unless i get the funding part wrong? are those not academic projects?

Until the government funding agencies are willing to do "big science" in computer science we're not going to get particle accelerator sized projects. It sort of happened in France, and bloom was the result.

https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom

The issue here is speed.

If it takes 10 years to get funding on particle physics, generally it doesn't matter "that much" because that part of the science scene moves pretty slowly.

If it takes 10 years to build a billion dollar cluster for AI today, what the hell is the AI world going to look like in 10 years anyway? Building a cluster to study AI ethics might be meaningless because a terminator may be pointing its laser rifle at our head by then telling us to be good little human subjects because Microsoft and OpenAI decided to move fast and break things.

So basic science will have to move to the private sector.

They should join Facebook or Google, get paid a ton, and do research there with the resources they need.

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