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echoangle 2 hours ago

Did the public fund googles research?

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cochne an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The public “funded” these models in the sense of contributing to their training data.

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Alex-C137 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The foundations of it, yes: "all of these were publicly or quasi-publicly funded"

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skrebbel an hour ago | parent [-]

This is genius. Whenever a company does some fundamental discovery, you can point at some grant they once got for something vaguely adjacent and say "see! quasi-publicly funded!" and your worldview is saved.

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Alex-C137 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's not vaguely adjacent, the actual foundations of that research were directly publicly funded and wouldn't be possible without it - the author is not talking about how their PageRank algorithm got funded nor money that Google received.

	▲	intuitionist 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Do you have a reference here, or are you just going to continue to baldly state it as a fact? I’m looking at “Attention is All You Need” and don’t see any grant numbers or anything like that.

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malcolmgreaves an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The author is correct. It is incredibly simple to trace how public research spending creates scientific advancements and how private companies add on the last 1-3% to commercialize the research.

If you want to learn, go trace how deep learning was funded. It started off with USPS.

	▲	skrebbel an hour ago \| parent [-]
		My entire argument is that techno-libertarians can enthusiastically say that all great innovations were done inside companies, and progressives/marxists/etc can enthusiastically say that well actually, many of those developments started with publicly funded research projects and public-private partnerships, and both are completely right at the same time because reality is messy. It doesn't prove nor disprove anything about whether governments or companies are better at innovation, or deserve more of the credit, or the upsides.