My observation is that research, especially in AI has left universities, which are now focusing their research to a lesser degree on STEM. It appears research is now done by companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tencent, Alibaba, among many others.

▲

bonoboTP 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Universities (outside a few) just have much weaker PR machines so you never hear what they do. Also their work is not user facing products so regular people, even tech power users won't see them.

▲

0x3f 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Not sure about that. How would a university test scaling hypotheses in AI, for example? The level of funding required is just not there, as far as I know.

▲

oscaracso 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Universities are also not suited to test which race car is the fastest, but that does not obviate the need for academic research in mechanical engineering.

▲

0x3f 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Perhaps but the fastest race car is not possibly marshalling in the end of human involvement in science, so you might consider these of considerably different levels of meriting the funding.

▲

oscaracso 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>marshalling in the end of human involvement in science

Good riddance! But not relevant in the least.

	▲	0x3f 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Impact size is not relevant to funding allocation?

▲

bonoboTP 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are a million other research things to do besides running huge pretraining runs and hyperparam grid search on giant clusters. To see what, you can start with checking out the best paper and similar awards at neurips, cvpr, iccv, iclr, icml etc.

▲

rsfern 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This issue of accessibility is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, but it doesn’t mean that only large companies are doing good research.

Personally I think this resource mismatch can help drive creative choice of research problems that don’t require massive resources. To misquote Feynman, there’s plenty of room at the bottom

▲

PaulHoule 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a specific field at a very specific time. In general there is a difference between research and development, you're going to expect the early work to be done in academia but the work to turn that into a product is done by commercial organizations.

You get ahead as an academic computer scientist, for instance, by writing papers not by writing software. Now there really are brilliant software developers in academic CS but most researchers wrote something that kinda works and give a conference talk about it -- and that's OK because the work to make something you can give a talk about is probably 20% of the work it would take to make something you can put in front of customers.

Because of that there are certain things academic researchers really can't do.

As I see it my experience in getting a PhD and my experience in startups is essentially the same: "how do you do make doing things nobody has ever done before routine?" Talk to people in either culture and you see the PhD students are thinking about either working in academia or a very short list of big prestigious companies and people at startups are sure the PhDs are too pedantic about everything.

It took me a long time of looking at other people's side projects that are usually "I want to learn programming language X", "I want to rewrite something from Software Tools in Rust" to realize just how foreign that kind of creative thinking is to people -- I've seen it for a long time that a side project is not worth doing unless: (1) I really need the product or (2) I can show people something they've never seen before or better yet both. These sound different, but if something doesn't satisfy (2) you can can usually satisfy (1) off the shelf. It just amazes me how many type (2) things stay novel even after 20 years of waiting.