David PfauLooking back on the last decade, it seems clear that Twitter caused some pretty significant shifts in how ML/AI research was driven. Papers could go viral in a way that wasn't really possible at conferences or on arXiv. This incentivized lots of work in areas that could grab your attention in a tweet - anything with cool videos or visuals. The current wave of generative AI probably wouldn't exist if it wasn't for social media. Was this a good thing? Will academics moving off Twitter change that?
Nantas Nardelli@pfau to me the big question is whether the AI community can fundamentally work as-is without a platform like Twitter. And if not, either (1) what do we need to do for Mastodon / Sigmoid to improve on the experience and maximise positive impact; or (2) how do we make AI research function at scale without a virtual public forum.
@pfau It’s kinda hard to tell whether Twitter has been objectively a net positive value add for us, but it probably depends on subjective experience. Plenty of people have used it to become community pillars (with both good and bad effects), and many junior members have occasionally managed to break through due to network effect. On the other end, it has also likely excluded folks who like to work outside mainstream ideas (but not all!). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@pfau maybe it’s time to force some kind of centralised community wide discourse…