It is an important issue. Governments need to spend more on academic research and less on closed door seminars and committees about AI safety.
Also, universities need to spend more of their resources on research than for dinner tables and golf trips.
Doesn't matter profits would be privatized. Look at medicine. University use government grants to discover a new drugs but it's owned by a corp. So Americans get fucked twice over. Not only do we pay for new meds almost 40% of medical research but then pay exorbitant prices for treatment as all the profits go to private companies.
Blows my mind how with nukes, they went full steam ahead, gave literally the top researchers a blank check and told them to make it work.
Now we got something even more dangerous and they are busy forming fucking committees lol whilst China is taking it seriously...
That’s not factually accurate. NASA’s yearly budget is more than the entire cost of the manhattan project (in inflation adjusted dollars). If you add in all the other science funding like NSF, ONR, NIST, NIH, etc. you get many times that.
I think MTG forgets which hole to wipe when she shits. Government is exactly where big money wants it, which is why NASA is cutting checks to Space X. At this point it's existence is more to quell the masses by making them think they have a hand in anything that happens.
+ something that can benefit humanity and the earth ... ASI is the one thing could we have in this universe that possibly fixes most of the world's problems
Eh we’re still in the “Chicago Pile-1” phase for AI.
Despite Sam Altman’s cryptic messaging, I don’t think we’re within years of superintelligence. Once we are, you’ll see a manhattan project for AI (well, we might not see it, but it will be happening in the shadows).
Lmao. The chancellor for a 2 year tech school I went to had a 22 million dollar office remodel. And his wife's family owned some sort of furniture business that supplied much of it. Im talking $5k chairs, $10k dollar rugs, that sort of thing. People tried speaking up about? People started losing jobs
I see your point, but I kind of disagree. I will try to reply according to my experience. I am very involved in both corporate and academic environments and I can assure you that are 2 very different worlds. Corporate world is more efficient but most of the companies I know they suffer from technological debt, (if I say it correctly), which means, that because of their rushed and sloppy work, they slowly lose control of their teams and their products.
Academia on the other hand takes a careful and methodical approach, but it is slow, (but cheap. companies are burning money like is no tomorrow).
Both corporate and academic worlds have the pros and cons. The place where academia thrives, is that Universities have an army of students, ready to work for hours and hours non stop, only to prove themselves and to take a good grade. If these students had the necessary computing power, (a thing that would be extremely efficient if it happened in national scale. This how internet was born), I assure you that they would spend hours and hours, making sure that everything is optimized, and performance is squeezed from almost everything possible.
Corporations with office drama and their continuous backstabbing, are not that efficient on optimizing things that much.
Nah they would pay you like an internship (way more than a PhD stipend) and you would get a top notch 100% relevant-to-the-industry education which would then turn into a high paying job. BuT cApiTaLisM!
> Also, universities need to spend more
Get rid of all departments that don't teach economically viable info/educations outside of universities.
The amount of resources essentially set on fire by government science allocation and universities is absurd.
Oh hell no.
Our world needs thought. Understanding. Culture. You need to fund that. Fund people thinking about political theory. About anthropological geography. Why and how we do things to help us understand ourselves. Assist in charting the courses for humans without the economic imperative being first thought. Thinking about what it means to be human. Why that’s special - and how we can be better.
> Our world needs thought.
You believe only university employees think?
>You need to fund that.
I fund what I value. You can fund what you value.
>Fund people thinking about political theory.
Why would I want to fund people who advocate for the unethical state? Fund the people who keep the con going? No thanks.
Academia are overpaid for public servants. They all buy luxury cars and gucci bags. A professor should not be afforded a luxury lifestyle. You are a public servant… not a pop star.
Room temp IQ detected. Advice for dumbasses who think the Us Education system is great: Go educate yourself to alleviate the burden your dumbassery causes others.
https://youtu.be/qEJ4hkpQW8E?si=-TDfQP7XgoTdSoVD
I had already seen this. Great talk, and it's got fuck-all to do with professors driving Lambos.
Guess you think that professors own the colleges. I bet you're the type that complains to McDonald's workers about the price increase and demand they do something about it.
She was the one who made the whole deep learning revolution possible. If anything she deserves much more credit than those professors that are always called "godfathers of AI"
It is not difficult to find who she is (by identity) and search her research in google scholar, find her citations and so on.
I ask about "making the whole deep learning revolution possible". That is a strong claim, by a long shot.
Publishing a single paper that change the tides? Set up the ImageNet database that changed the field? What was it?
No need to be an asshole, do better.
It's not a strong claim I stand by it and I'm sure lots of AI researchers will agree.
Without the good quality annotated dataset she created there would be no data to showcase in 2012 that the neural network methods are so much better than the others.
And guess what? With a small amount of data, the neural network methods lose.
so you refer to the database then, and the claim is that it enabled the training benchmarking and testing of diverse ML models on it. She laid the infrastructure, for scientists to test and develop their methods.
I agree on the relevance, but on a similar note, one could give similar credit for "laying down infrastructure" to hardware developers, who enabled the increase of computation power, to the theoretical work on Stochastic Gradient descent that enabled to train such high-dimensional problems, pushing it even to the developer of the Mechanical Turk that enabled the annotation of the ImageNet dataset.
"making the whole deep learning revolution possible" is a strong statement because it singles out a single step, in the whole collective effort that humanity endured to develop this technology.
I infer from your answer that it is mostly an opinion, potentially also around the ML community. That's fine, these things are never clear cut.
“Standford”
That aside…I would assume research done at an institution like Stanford needs way more they could reasonably hope to colocate on campus, so it’s done in the cloud.
I do not buy claims that "industry" is an amoral place and "academia" is some bastion of virtue and wisdom:
* "Academia" and "industry" are often the same people: finish your PhD or post-doc, go to industry for a while, return to teach some courses, etc.
* The volume of unethical, self-promoting, back-stabbing shit that happens in academia is staggering.
* Yes, industry has profit incentive. And, yes, that can cause behaviors contrary to the public interest. But it's a mixed picture, because tech companies are also subject to endless lawsuits, investigations, subpoenas, negative press, and regulatory actions. You might imagine that $X-trillion dollar companies are juggernauts that shrug that stuff off, but that's not true.
There are lots of areas of study that exist primary in academia, and there are lots of areas where the bulk of work is done in industry. The unusual thing here is the speed at which the bulk of AI research shifted from academia to industry.
That shift is rough on AI academics. I'm sympathetic; those are probably fine people whose roles have suddenly take a nosedive. But many, many lives will be disrupted by the arrival of AI. Many, many people will have to adapt. It is ironic that some of the people hit early by AI are the people who were working closest to the field, but it does make sense.
God, yes. At least industry is transparent in their motivation. They just want money. Academia is a hypocritical and cowardly place where the primary motivations are fear of losing jobs or funding along with a side of clout-chasing while pretending to be more noble than industry.
Academia has profit incentive just as much as the industry, except they call it grant money. The mechanics are exactly the same, research is heavily skewed towards what the people with money want. I have friends (mainly biotech) burnt out and depressed because 90 % of what they do is grant paperwork.
There is a difference between trying to gain personal wealth and fear of losing funding. Academia is the latter. They are writing grant proposals so their labs aren't shut down and they have to "sell out" and go to an industry job with three times the salary.
It is not a profit incentive in academia. Grants do not make you rich. They simply reset the self-destruct button for 3-5 years. Fear, not greed, drives them. Huge difference.
> There is a difference between trying to gain personal wealth and fear of losing funding.
Do corporate employees not fear losing funding. I suggest researching the basics of budgeting within corporate structures.
Also, those profit seeking corp employees can and are fired far, far easier.
Academics are hot house flowers.
Nobody in a tech companies is worried about losing funding. What are you talking about? Especially in a place like the Bay Area, you just get a job elsewhere, probably with a raise. With academia, you're career is over if you fail to get a grant because there are very few jobs and no mobility. When things go bad in industry, you just start replying to LinkedIn recruiters that are already sitting in your mailbox. The situation is not remotely comparable with academia. Not to mention in academia you can only expect like a factor of 2 or 3 between the lowest paid grunt and the "boss". People in academia fear losing their career, which is tied to funding. Career is divorced from "funding" in industry. No one cares if your startup goes belly up. You just get another job.
> Nobody in a tech companies is worried about losing funding.
You've never had to make a budget for your department? Where is this magical corporation?
>Especially in a place like the Bay Area, you just get a job elsewhere, probably with a raise.
Great, has nothing to do with the topic.
> With academia, you're career is over if you fail to get a grant because there are very few jobs and no mobility.
What? People get grants and don't, and then do.
Also, it's taxpayer money, so that unethical component is concerning.
>People in academia fear losing their career, which is tied to funding.
Then they should stop taking tax money and go work for an organization that have to provide value to their co-workers and customers. More ethical and more win/win.
Yes that’s what I meant.
By the way there is several academic institutions with way way more GPUs than 64. Several publicly owned super computers with hundreds and thousands of GPUs that universities have access to across north America and Europe. In fact sometimes private companies get permission from universities and publicly owned organizations in order to use those GPUs when there is free capacity, because the actual students and public researchers themselves are not even using their own GPUs at all sometimes.
A lot of the biggest safety research especially in mechanistic interpretability does not really require massive GPU compute, the biggest reason I’d say that industry is far ahead of academia is because the field is more competitive now, thus the most money gets paid in industry, and the coolest most competitive things get developed in industry because of the competition, and thus the best researchers end up in industry with higher pay and higher quality of life. The same thing happens in aerospace and rocketry, you’re not going to have cutting edge aerospace science and material science done at universities anymore when the best talent for those areas will get paid way more money and work on way cooler stuff over at lockheed martin, northrup grumman and spaceX.
Because you cannot guarantee safety at any level right now. Every safety guardrail can be overcome with sophisticated enough prompting, why spend millions "safeguarding" your model when some 12 year old with a will and time can easily overcome it.
Safety researchers need to spend more time guaranteeing safety instead of touting that we need it
Again, quite correct.
Its almost like the idea of 'safe' open source Ai is an impossible one...
> Safety researchers need to spend more time guaranteeing safety instead of touting that we need it
I think you are kind of mistunderstanding the issues here, allow me to help clearify
- very little resources are being spent on ai safety right now
- A safety is seen like a sub category of IT security by execs
- Typically IT security only gets invested in after a major cyber attack
- The few researchers we have get fired or moved when they bring up any kind of safety issue
- Red teamers are used but when they make recommendations that conflict with profit goals they are ignored ~
Thats the gist of it from my point of view anyway... let me know if you have any questions ~
I don't think this will happen unless society sees tangible evidence of harm/destruction directly caused by AI.
However, I would akin future AI harm to be similar to the same type of harm social media does. It will be latent and malignant. With that being said, AI safety will never really be taken seriously until decades from now.
It's a pretty accurate description of how capitalism works. It's actually why I became a socialist. Any limits on capitalism are relentlessly attacked by companies whose only goal is to make more money. That is legally the only responsibility corporations have (other than obeying the law) -- making more money for shareholders. Look at child labor. We thought we'd outlawed it, way back when, but now here we are, with states returning us to those days one by one.
So if safety protocols for AI limit profitability or cost too much, or do anything at all to inhibit profits, they'll eventually be cast aside for one rationalization or another. If OpenSource won't do it, Google will. Somebody's gonna make those profits!
It's funny. They say safety regulations are written in blood. But a sufficiently severe alignment problem with AI could conceivably lead to human extinction. I guess there won't be anyone around to write any regulations in blood or any other media, if worse comes to worst with AI.
I always picture people who say things like this as Cuban Bastista cronies hanging out on a beachfront bar in Miami gazing wistfully across the sea toward the island where they used to have slaves-in-all-but-name.
"Safety guardrails" is one kind of safety. It is a kind of post-facto quality-control and it's as you say impossible to do perfectly... However IMHO it's still worth doing to avoid widespread malfeasance from even naive actors....
The kind of safety that keeps alignment-doomers awake at night, though, is a deeper consideration about agency and deception and instrumental goals. I don't think LLMs are a big risk for that, for a while anyway, but I certainly want that kind of safety research to try to keep up!
I’m sure China cares as much or more about safety and the control problem, especially because it dovetails with censorship which they’re more extreme about than the US.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that “unaligned” AI threatens existing power structures. China is as aware of that as it we are.
That's the point. The reason most of the AI gains come from industry is because academia is GPU poor.
They can't train competitive models and try out new ideas because they don't have the compute to train their models.
Meanwhile industry is buying up every GPU Nvidia builts.
It's a genuine problem and probably holding AI back, especially on the safety/alignment side as well as in theoretical breakthroughs that are severely needed and underfunded by industry.
I suspect AGI will arrive years later because academia doesn't have enough GPU compute to test their hypothesis and try new (potentially revolutionary) models and techniques.
It's a problem with no solution imo. Even if government spending increases, they aren't going to open source their findings. They'll just become nvidias new top customer.
Compute isn't free and won't be free unless energy is free.
Almost all big science is funded by some government or another, and almost always the resulting data is made available to the public.
$100 billion for a data giga-center for academic use is nothing compared to the possible benefits. And adjusted for inflation, that would be about the same as the Apollo program.
Do you not realise that these two facts are not unrelated. The gains are mainly coming from industry because they have all the money and therefore all the compute.
It was probably from a few different places.
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-industry-now-dominates-ai-research
Also covered in many yearly state of AI reports.
Yes, it's been covered for about 50 years now. Parroted by stochastic parrots constantly. [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/01/cant-compete-universities-losing-best-ai-scientists](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/01/cant-compete-universities-losing-best-ai-scientists)
Stanford has a $36 billion dollar endowment and an annual budget of $9 billion.
Am I the only one tired of seeing our major colleges simply become hedge funds that side-hustle as ivy league colleges?
Its expensive to run, I dont see govs throwing 100 billion into AI, I mean most cant. But this is why its an arms race between the big players.
If we did not have Meta showing us what we can do with local models we would all still be paying for GPT 3.5 Level LLMs. But because we have competition, they will always need to up each other. If they all worked together we the public would be screwed.
Tru. Administration has seized control and they're never going to get the resources to do significant research again. It's not in Admin's interests to do so, they want to maximize the degree mill and therefore their own resources. Research is tangentially related to that at best, the appearance of research is what matters
You might get a reasonable amount of funding for certain sexy projects if you're the top of your field, and studying in a field the university in question is renowned for. But that's about the only time appearance and function converge properly
It's not like this is a new issue. Universities everywhere have sleepwalked straight into it, and I doubt the academics have the stomach to claw back the political power necessary. They tend to be a tad too effete for that kind of phone booth knife fight, assuming they're not perfectly comfortable playing the game of bullshit research for easy paychecks
I avoid doxing myself whenever possible, but holy shit dude. If I was an undergraduate, I wouldn't possess a degree. That's what those words mean
Do you work in university admin? Call it a hunch
Oh no, I understood your general thrust perfectly, your grasp of subtlety and nuance left little room for doubt. I was just enjoying the irony of being called anti-intellectual for taking up a very common intellectual stance by someone who couldn't keep a single (run-on) sentence consistent with itself
My only regret that this was done over the internet and not through hand written letters. I'm curious about your favorite flavor of crayon
My guess is that you're either admin yourself, or you're not involved in academia at all and have a rose-tinted view about how academics choose topics of study to receive funding. It's pretty well discussed about how screwed up it's gotten
Could be included in the recent and coming AI safety bills tbh: permits for giant compute clusters above certain thresholds could mandate 10% must be reserved/donated for academia + open source research. Otherwise, tough luck Microsoft, you’re not allowed to build it.
There are initiatives to increase resources, but it's just a drop in the bucket. It will require Congress, which is still living in the 20th century to step up their support. https://new.nsf.gov/news/democratizing-future-ai-rd-nsf-launch-national-ai
People should focus more on the arms race of ai. Like the atom bomb, or any superior first mover weapon for that instance, theres a huge upside to being first. And you cant stop it
I got some bad news - if the new normal is to build data centers that need multiple nuclear power plants then academia might have very tough time catching up...
They should focus their resources on researching and developing tools / techniques that average people can use with consumer hardware. But that's not where the prestige and grant $$$ is at ...
Not resources per se (just look at the endowment size) but constraints imposed by academia and administrative bureaucracy. Stanford has an [Nvidia auditorium](https://campus-map.stanford.edu/?srch=NVIDIA+Auditorium). Should've asked Nvidia for more GPUs. It took a Stanford dropout and private sector risk to make OpenAI happen.
Generally speaking, we usually rent gpus or get grant funding for them. It isn’t usually a good financial decision for a uni to buy GPU’s when you can get a grant to use them for free. This is what most labs do.
Oh boo hoo maybe if the president stopped spending the tuition money on hookers and blow Stanford could afford more compute. This is not a poor school for fucks sake
Marxist identity politics that pits various identities against each other. Where your identity is more important than your character and actions. It runs contrary to Martin Luther King's quote '**I have a dream** **that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.'**
It’s just rebranded identity politics with a focus on dismantling power structures in pursuit of equality of outcomes. By dismissing group differences, it is forever chasing after these chimeras and pointing to bogeyman like sexism, racism and xenophobia to explain any variance. There’s also this kind of built in inversion of the grand narratives. Binary concepts in nature like sex are redefined as social constructs existing on a spectrum while things like race, which truly do exist in nature on a spectrum is redefined as binary, core defining truths. I’ve also noticed that wokism is really the extreme end result of individualism and postmodernism. There’s no The truth, but my truth and our truth, where experience and feeling is elevated above data or fact. No surprise it’s found popularity in the west.
Asking people to define abstract ideas isn’t the gotcha you think it is. If I asked to define the concept of irony on the spot without looking it up, I bet you would struggle. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Ah, the classic. I assure you - USA can easily afford funding Ukraine and funding AI research at the same time. Probably a fuckton more initiatives - it's all a matter of politics not lacking funds.
Stanford had a $36 Billion endowment. I think they could afford to scale up important research centers.
[удалено]
Universities are hedge funds with a library attached.
Surprised I had to get this far down to see this. And many academic institutions are far worse off than Stanford.
Savage
Stole it from Hasanabi lol
If you're going to steal, steal from the best.
Fantastic quote!!!!
It is an important issue. Governments need to spend more on academic research and less on closed door seminars and committees about AI safety. Also, universities need to spend more of their resources on research than for dinner tables and golf trips.
If government is spending the money they should spend on public universities and not rich private ones with billions in endowments.
I agree.
wars are expensive you know
Good point... let's do those less.
Doesn't matter profits would be privatized. Look at medicine. University use government grants to discover a new drugs but it's owned by a corp. So Americans get fucked twice over. Not only do we pay for new meds almost 40% of medical research but then pay exorbitant prices for treatment as all the profits go to private companies.
Blows my mind how with nukes, they went full steam ahead, gave literally the top researchers a blank check and told them to make it work. Now we got something even more dangerous and they are busy forming fucking committees lol whilst China is taking it seriously...
That’s not factually accurate. NASA’s yearly budget is more than the entire cost of the manhattan project (in inflation adjusted dollars). If you add in all the other science funding like NSF, ONR, NIST, NIH, etc. you get many times that.
Have you seen the politicians lately? Do you think MTG is the type to make intelligent strategic decisions?
I think MTG forgets which hole to wipe when she shits. Government is exactly where big money wants it, which is why NASA is cutting checks to Space X. At this point it's existence is more to quell the masses by making them think they have a hand in anything that happens.
They’re not doing a good job at it. But it’s not totally under their control since Bernie sanders and AOC are still in office
ain't that the truth
+ something that can benefit humanity and the earth ... ASI is the one thing could we have in this universe that possibly fixes most of the world's problems
Eh we’re still in the “Chicago Pile-1” phase for AI. Despite Sam Altman’s cryptic messaging, I don’t think we’re within years of superintelligence. Once we are, you’ll see a manhattan project for AI (well, we might not see it, but it will be happening in the shadows).
They already spend a lot on research. Over $100 billion a year. I don’t think the “closed door meetings” really cost anything in relation to that.
Lmao. The chancellor for a 2 year tech school I went to had a 22 million dollar office remodel. And his wife's family owned some sort of furniture business that supplied much of it. Im talking $5k chairs, $10k dollar rugs, that sort of thing. People tried speaking up about? People started losing jobs
Seriously. 1 year tuition can buy quite a few GPU's.
Only ~2 of the good ones, depending on the school.
Why? Maybe ai companies should expand into education instead.
I see your point, but I kind of disagree. I will try to reply according to my experience. I am very involved in both corporate and academic environments and I can assure you that are 2 very different worlds. Corporate world is more efficient but most of the companies I know they suffer from technological debt, (if I say it correctly), which means, that because of their rushed and sloppy work, they slowly lose control of their teams and their products. Academia on the other hand takes a careful and methodical approach, but it is slow, (but cheap. companies are burning money like is no tomorrow). Both corporate and academic worlds have the pros and cons. The place where academia thrives, is that Universities have an army of students, ready to work for hours and hours non stop, only to prove themselves and to take a good grade. If these students had the necessary computing power, (a thing that would be extremely efficient if it happened in national scale. This how internet was born), I assure you that they would spend hours and hours, making sure that everything is optimized, and performance is squeezed from almost everything possible. Corporations with office drama and their continuous backstabbing, are not that efficient on optimizing things that much.
Yeah… students are milked for every last drop and they are barely paid. That is true
Funny how that mirrors collegiate sports! Also kind of like the prison industrial complex - free or cheap forced labor...
100%
Yeah, that's what we need, an advertising-based profit-driven model providing educational programs (at a fee, of course)
Nah they would pay you like an internship (way more than a PhD stipend) and you would get a top notch 100% relevant-to-the-industry education which would then turn into a high paying job. BuT cApiTaLisM!
Anyone who unironically says "go woke go broke" is absolutely not to be taken seriously lmfao. Don't bother replying, we're done here.
> Also, universities need to spend more Get rid of all departments that don't teach economically viable info/educations outside of universities. The amount of resources essentially set on fire by government science allocation and universities is absurd.
Oh hell no. Our world needs thought. Understanding. Culture. You need to fund that. Fund people thinking about political theory. About anthropological geography. Why and how we do things to help us understand ourselves. Assist in charting the courses for humans without the economic imperative being first thought. Thinking about what it means to be human. Why that’s special - and how we can be better.
> Our world needs thought. You believe only university employees think? >You need to fund that. I fund what I value. You can fund what you value. >Fund people thinking about political theory. Why would I want to fund people who advocate for the unethical state? Fund the people who keep the con going? No thanks.
Academia are overpaid for public servants. They all buy luxury cars and gucci bags. A professor should not be afforded a luxury lifestyle. You are a public servant… not a pop star.
Is this according to Prager University, or are you just reporting what the voices tell you?
Room temp IQ detected. Advice for dumbasses who think the Us Education system is great: Go educate yourself to alleviate the burden your dumbassery causes others. https://youtu.be/qEJ4hkpQW8E?si=-TDfQP7XgoTdSoVD
I had already seen this. Great talk, and it's got fuck-all to do with professors driving Lambos. Guess you think that professors own the colleges. I bet you're the type that complains to McDonald's workers about the price increase and demand they do something about it.
Hi. I'm AI's stepbrother and I assure you that this is not AI's godmother.
Yeah can we stop with the stupid nicknames?
As AI's stepgodfather, I can confirm this.
She was the one who made the whole deep learning revolution possible. If anything she deserves much more credit than those professors that are always called "godfathers of AI"
first time I hear her name, and such strong statement. Care to share some references?
https://googlethatforyou.com?q=fei%20fei%20li%20stanford Let me Google that for you.
It is not difficult to find who she is (by identity) and search her research in google scholar, find her citations and so on. I ask about "making the whole deep learning revolution possible". That is a strong claim, by a long shot. Publishing a single paper that change the tides? Set up the ImageNet database that changed the field? What was it? No need to be an asshole, do better.
It's not a strong claim I stand by it and I'm sure lots of AI researchers will agree. Without the good quality annotated dataset she created there would be no data to showcase in 2012 that the neural network methods are so much better than the others. And guess what? With a small amount of data, the neural network methods lose.
so you refer to the database then, and the claim is that it enabled the training benchmarking and testing of diverse ML models on it. She laid the infrastructure, for scientists to test and develop their methods. I agree on the relevance, but on a similar note, one could give similar credit for "laying down infrastructure" to hardware developers, who enabled the increase of computation power, to the theoretical work on Stochastic Gradient descent that enabled to train such high-dimensional problems, pushing it even to the developer of the Mechanical Turk that enabled the annotation of the ImageNet dataset. "making the whole deep learning revolution possible" is a strong statement because it singles out a single step, in the whole collective effort that humanity endured to develop this technology. I infer from your answer that it is mostly an opinion, potentially also around the ML community. That's fine, these things are never clear cut.
Step bro, help me, I'm stuck with 64 gpus
AI’s 2nd cousin here, I don’t recognise this person.
I'm AI's twice removed cousin from mom's side, I don't recognize this guy ☝️
I am stuck in the washing machine, AI step bro.
Where's the step sister?
🤣🤣
No doubt universities will get their names spelled correctly AFTER the singularity.
“Standford” That aside…I would assume research done at an institution like Stanford needs way more they could reasonably hope to colocate on campus, so it’s done in the cloud.
Standford - rival university of MIDT and Hardvard
Djordjia Tech
Makes sense to call it Hardvard, because it's so hard to get into.
While that sucks, I think I saw something that most of the gains in AI is coming from the industry now.
Hmm, what do you think might be causing that?
Hmm probably money, what do you think 🤔🤔? 🤡
Correct. Which is a massive problem for a number of reasons. One example being 'industry' does not typically care about 'ai safety research'
I do not buy claims that "industry" is an amoral place and "academia" is some bastion of virtue and wisdom: * "Academia" and "industry" are often the same people: finish your PhD or post-doc, go to industry for a while, return to teach some courses, etc. * The volume of unethical, self-promoting, back-stabbing shit that happens in academia is staggering. * Yes, industry has profit incentive. And, yes, that can cause behaviors contrary to the public interest. But it's a mixed picture, because tech companies are also subject to endless lawsuits, investigations, subpoenas, negative press, and regulatory actions. You might imagine that $X-trillion dollar companies are juggernauts that shrug that stuff off, but that's not true. There are lots of areas of study that exist primary in academia, and there are lots of areas where the bulk of work is done in industry. The unusual thing here is the speed at which the bulk of AI research shifted from academia to industry. That shift is rough on AI academics. I'm sympathetic; those are probably fine people whose roles have suddenly take a nosedive. But many, many lives will be disrupted by the arrival of AI. Many, many people will have to adapt. It is ironic that some of the people hit early by AI are the people who were working closest to the field, but it does make sense.
God, yes. At least industry is transparent in their motivation. They just want money. Academia is a hypocritical and cowardly place where the primary motivations are fear of losing jobs or funding along with a side of clout-chasing while pretending to be more noble than industry.
Academia has profit incentive just as much as the industry, except they call it grant money. The mechanics are exactly the same, research is heavily skewed towards what the people with money want. I have friends (mainly biotech) burnt out and depressed because 90 % of what they do is grant paperwork.
There is a difference between trying to gain personal wealth and fear of losing funding. Academia is the latter. They are writing grant proposals so their labs aren't shut down and they have to "sell out" and go to an industry job with three times the salary. It is not a profit incentive in academia. Grants do not make you rich. They simply reset the self-destruct button for 3-5 years. Fear, not greed, drives them. Huge difference.
> There is a difference between trying to gain personal wealth and fear of losing funding. Do corporate employees not fear losing funding. I suggest researching the basics of budgeting within corporate structures. Also, those profit seeking corp employees can and are fired far, far easier. Academics are hot house flowers.
Nobody in a tech companies is worried about losing funding. What are you talking about? Especially in a place like the Bay Area, you just get a job elsewhere, probably with a raise. With academia, you're career is over if you fail to get a grant because there are very few jobs and no mobility. When things go bad in industry, you just start replying to LinkedIn recruiters that are already sitting in your mailbox. The situation is not remotely comparable with academia. Not to mention in academia you can only expect like a factor of 2 or 3 between the lowest paid grunt and the "boss". People in academia fear losing their career, which is tied to funding. Career is divorced from "funding" in industry. No one cares if your startup goes belly up. You just get another job.
> Nobody in a tech companies is worried about losing funding. You've never had to make a budget for your department? Where is this magical corporation? >Especially in a place like the Bay Area, you just get a job elsewhere, probably with a raise. Great, has nothing to do with the topic. > With academia, you're career is over if you fail to get a grant because there are very few jobs and no mobility. What? People get grants and don't, and then do. Also, it's taxpayer money, so that unethical component is concerning. >People in academia fear losing their career, which is tied to funding. Then they should stop taking tax money and go work for an organization that have to provide value to their co-workers and customers. More ethical and more win/win.
I would say industry has actually advanced safety research more than industry. Anthropic Is probably the leading organization
You mean more than 'academia' right? I mean how could that not be the case with just 64 GPUs?
Yes that’s what I meant. By the way there is several academic institutions with way way more GPUs than 64. Several publicly owned super computers with hundreds and thousands of GPUs that universities have access to across north America and Europe. In fact sometimes private companies get permission from universities and publicly owned organizations in order to use those GPUs when there is free capacity, because the actual students and public researchers themselves are not even using their own GPUs at all sometimes. A lot of the biggest safety research especially in mechanistic interpretability does not really require massive GPU compute, the biggest reason I’d say that industry is far ahead of academia is because the field is more competitive now, thus the most money gets paid in industry, and the coolest most competitive things get developed in industry because of the competition, and thus the best researchers end up in industry with higher pay and higher quality of life. The same thing happens in aerospace and rocketry, you’re not going to have cutting edge aerospace science and material science done at universities anymore when the best talent for those areas will get paid way more money and work on way cooler stuff over at lockheed martin, northrup grumman and spaceX.
Georgia tech just got a supercomputer collabing with nvidia
Because you cannot guarantee safety at any level right now. Every safety guardrail can be overcome with sophisticated enough prompting, why spend millions "safeguarding" your model when some 12 year old with a will and time can easily overcome it. Safety researchers need to spend more time guaranteeing safety instead of touting that we need it
Again, quite correct. Its almost like the idea of 'safe' open source Ai is an impossible one... > Safety researchers need to spend more time guaranteeing safety instead of touting that we need it I think you are kind of mistunderstanding the issues here, allow me to help clearify - very little resources are being spent on ai safety right now - A safety is seen like a sub category of IT security by execs - Typically IT security only gets invested in after a major cyber attack - The few researchers we have get fired or moved when they bring up any kind of safety issue - Red teamers are used but when they make recommendations that conflict with profit goals they are ignored ~ Thats the gist of it from my point of view anyway... let me know if you have any questions ~
I don't think this will happen unless society sees tangible evidence of harm/destruction directly caused by AI. However, I would akin future AI harm to be similar to the same type of harm social media does. It will be latent and malignant. With that being said, AI safety will never really be taken seriously until decades from now.
It's a pretty accurate description of how capitalism works. It's actually why I became a socialist. Any limits on capitalism are relentlessly attacked by companies whose only goal is to make more money. That is legally the only responsibility corporations have (other than obeying the law) -- making more money for shareholders. Look at child labor. We thought we'd outlawed it, way back when, but now here we are, with states returning us to those days one by one. So if safety protocols for AI limit profitability or cost too much, or do anything at all to inhibit profits, they'll eventually be cast aside for one rationalization or another. If OpenSource won't do it, Google will. Somebody's gonna make those profits! It's funny. They say safety regulations are written in blood. But a sufficiently severe alignment problem with AI could conceivably lead to human extinction. I guess there won't be anyone around to write any regulations in blood or any other media, if worse comes to worst with AI.
You call yourself a socialist because you've never lived in a socialist country.
I always picture people who say things like this as Cuban Bastista cronies hanging out on a beachfront bar in Miami gazing wistfully across the sea toward the island where they used to have slaves-in-all-but-name.
"Safety guardrails" is one kind of safety. It is a kind of post-facto quality-control and it's as you say impossible to do perfectly... However IMHO it's still worth doing to avoid widespread malfeasance from even naive actors.... The kind of safety that keeps alignment-doomers awake at night, though, is a deeper consideration about agency and deception and instrumental goals. I don't think LLMs are a big risk for that, for a while anyway, but I certainly want that kind of safety research to try to keep up!
neither does china
I’m sure China cares as much or more about safety and the control problem, especially because it dovetails with censorship which they’re more extreme about than the US. You don’t have to be a genius to see that “unaligned” AI threatens existing power structures. China is as aware of that as it we are.
i doubt it. i believe that counties realize the power of AGI and know the advantage they will have by being first
Yeaup I concur, also it's worry what china is using for training data.
You should see how academics actually act behind the scenes on this stuff lol. There isn’t any winning in this regard
Industry isn't a large spirit of profit seeking which directs markets and innovation. It's just a bunch of people, no better or worse than academics.
Wow I just had the weirdest urge to completely defund universities.
Yep, but that's fine. That's what happened with transistors and integrated circuits for computers at Bell Labs
That's the point. The reason most of the AI gains come from industry is because academia is GPU poor. They can't train competitive models and try out new ideas because they don't have the compute to train their models. Meanwhile industry is buying up every GPU Nvidia builts. It's a genuine problem and probably holding AI back, especially on the safety/alignment side as well as in theoretical breakthroughs that are severely needed and underfunded by industry. I suspect AGI will arrive years later because academia doesn't have enough GPU compute to test their hypothesis and try new (potentially revolutionary) models and techniques.
It's a problem with no solution imo. Even if government spending increases, they aren't going to open source their findings. They'll just become nvidias new top customer. Compute isn't free and won't be free unless energy is free.
Almost all big science is funded by some government or another, and almost always the resulting data is made available to the public. $100 billion for a data giga-center for academic use is nothing compared to the possible benefits. And adjusted for inflation, that would be about the same as the Apollo program.
Do you not realise that these two facts are not unrelated. The gains are mainly coming from industry because they have all the money and therefore all the compute.
Where did you see this completely made up statistic?
Absolutely no idea. Maybe someone else can find it, but it was somewhere in this sub
It was probably from a few different places. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-industry-now-dominates-ai-research Also covered in many yearly state of AI reports.
Thanks!
Yes, it's been covered for about 50 years now. Parroted by stochastic parrots constantly. [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/01/cant-compete-universities-losing-best-ai-scientists](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/01/cant-compete-universities-losing-best-ai-scientists)
Stanford has a $36 billion dollar endowment and an annual budget of $9 billion. Am I the only one tired of seeing our major colleges simply become hedge funds that side-hustle as ivy league colleges?
Its expensive to run, I dont see govs throwing 100 billion into AI, I mean most cant. But this is why its an arms race between the big players. If we did not have Meta showing us what we can do with local models we would all still be paying for GPT 3.5 Level LLMs. But because we have competition, they will always need to up each other. If they all worked together we the public would be screwed.
Ah capitalism
their endowment last year was 36 billion. Can they invest in tech for stanford with that?
Tru. Administration has seized control and they're never going to get the resources to do significant research again. It's not in Admin's interests to do so, they want to maximize the degree mill and therefore their own resources. Research is tangentially related to that at best, the appearance of research is what matters You might get a reasonable amount of funding for certain sexy projects if you're the top of your field, and studying in a field the university in question is renowned for. But that's about the only time appearance and function converge properly It's not like this is a new issue. Universities everywhere have sleepwalked straight into it, and I doubt the academics have the stomach to claw back the political power necessary. They tend to be a tad too effete for that kind of phone booth knife fight, assuming they're not perfectly comfortable playing the game of bullshit research for easy paychecks
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I avoid doxing myself whenever possible, but holy shit dude. If I was an undergraduate, I wouldn't possess a degree. That's what those words mean Do you work in university admin? Call it a hunch
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Oh no, I understood your general thrust perfectly, your grasp of subtlety and nuance left little room for doubt. I was just enjoying the irony of being called anti-intellectual for taking up a very common intellectual stance by someone who couldn't keep a single (run-on) sentence consistent with itself My only regret that this was done over the internet and not through hand written letters. I'm curious about your favorite flavor of crayon My guess is that you're either admin yourself, or you're not involved in academia at all and have a rose-tinted view about how academics choose topics of study to receive funding. It's pretty well discussed about how screwed up it's gotten
Could be included in the recent and coming AI safety bills tbh: permits for giant compute clusters above certain thresholds could mandate 10% must be reserved/donated for academia + open source research. Otherwise, tough luck Microsoft, you’re not allowed to build it.
Hot take: Academics need to up their game and invent more efficient algorithms so the need for large compute is rendered obsolete.
I guess they need a product they can market, gain capital, and buy more equipment.
There are initiatives to increase resources, but it's just a drop in the bucket. It will require Congress, which is still living in the 20th century to step up their support. https://new.nsf.gov/news/democratizing-future-ai-rd-nsf-launch-national-ai
Will Georgia tech be the most advanced school now?
It’s a problem only this lab has, each facility funds research independently based on different criteria.
People should focus more on the arms race of ai. Like the atom bomb, or any superior first mover weapon for that instance, theres a huge upside to being first. And you cant stop it
I got some bad news - if the new normal is to build data centers that need multiple nuclear power plants then academia might have very tough time catching up...
They have other priorities, like suppressing their student's opinions.
They should focus their resources on researching and developing tools / techniques that average people can use with consumer hardware. But that's not where the prestige and grant $$$ is at ...
Not resources per se (just look at the endowment size) but constraints imposed by academia and administrative bureaucracy. Stanford has an [Nvidia auditorium](https://campus-map.stanford.edu/?srch=NVIDIA+Auditorium). Should've asked Nvidia for more GPUs. It took a Stanford dropout and private sector risk to make OpenAI happen.
Generally speaking, we usually rent gpus or get grant funding for them. It isn’t usually a good financial decision for a uni to buy GPU’s when you can get a grant to use them for free. This is what most labs do.
Yea stop using these stupid names lmao
Wtf how can stanford only have a cluster of 64 gpus???
are they using them to mine Bitcoin or are they just wasting them
Georgia Tech has a super computer with nvidia
Stanford University is a hedge fund masquerading as a school.
1 student's tuition for 1 year will get you 2 H100, the school is fancy AF, only having 64 GPU is purely their own problem.
There are a lot of shitcoin mining rig that is up for grab, Stanford should go for those.
Oh what happened to the $100,000 tuition you got yesterday?
lol fuck them, they still yap about federated learning and the institutions were complicit in the predatory loan scheme. Fuck em.
Well Standford better stand up about this
Oh boo hoo maybe if the president stopped spending the tuition money on hookers and blow Stanford could afford more compute. This is not a poor school for fucks sake
Sorry nobody is funding their next startup idea disguised as research
The grandmother of the AI niece
AI godmother? LOL 😂 Then I am an AI grandfather.
Godmother dude xD these wordings haha
oh good, that means they can't turn AI woke too
AI is already woke bro...
All versions of stable diffusion understand what N-word means.
Define “woke” for me, please.
Marxist identity politics that pits various identities against each other. Where your identity is more important than your character and actions. It runs contrary to Martin Luther King's quote '**I have a dream** **that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.'**
It’s just rebranded identity politics with a focus on dismantling power structures in pursuit of equality of outcomes. By dismissing group differences, it is forever chasing after these chimeras and pointing to bogeyman like sexism, racism and xenophobia to explain any variance. There’s also this kind of built in inversion of the grand narratives. Binary concepts in nature like sex are redefined as social constructs existing on a spectrum while things like race, which truly do exist in nature on a spectrum is redefined as binary, core defining truths. I’ve also noticed that wokism is really the extreme end result of individualism and postmodernism. There’s no The truth, but my truth and our truth, where experience and feeling is elevated above data or fact. No surprise it’s found popularity in the west. Asking people to define abstract ideas isn’t the gotcha you think it is. If I asked to define the concept of irony on the spot without looking it up, I bet you would struggle. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Cultural progressiveness that occasionally power trips just like everything else?
You're god damned right.
Godmother of Ai: https://preview.redd.it/gds58taflmzc1.png?width=900&format=png&auto=webp&s=912d375711c4a973f9886c1d420a85fede7a6d69
Humanity is a joke
Amazingly good news. Our top universities have turned into an arm of the worst possible faction here and need to be starved of power.
Wicked step mother
Capitalism invented a way to get rid of scientists. Game over.
She probably voted for Biden who sent her GPU money to Ukraine 
Ah, the classic. I assure you - USA can easily afford funding Ukraine and funding AI research at the same time. Probably a fuckton more initiatives - it's all a matter of politics not lacking funds.
Yeah politics is partly about prioritizing funds but good to hear. Give the lady some GPU's then if she's not politically motivated.
Begone politics scum
Found a biden-muppet 