Meredith WhittakerMar 10, 2024

Notable that this longstanding problem, which I and a few others have been naming for ~a decade, is now common sense.

It's true. AI is fundamentally a technology controlled by Big Tech. But the current 'solutions' to this problem would extend, not dilute, Big Tech control. 1/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/10/big-tech-companies-ai-research/

Silicon Valley is pricing academics out of AI research

A growing chorus of academics say the sky-high cost of working with AI models is boxing researchers out of the field, compromising independent study of the technology.

The Washington Post
Show threadDavid Mankins

@Mer__edith

Maybe this is at leat a little bit of a feature instead of a bug? The megawatt datacenters are brute-forcing the known techniques, limited resources might lead to different approaches.

Given the gap between multi-megawatt data centers, and 45-watt human brains, there’s room for more elegant solutions to the AI problem. Alternatively, physics, faced with limited availability of state-level resources in the form of colliders, turned to less-resource-hungry things like chaos and complexity (solving different problems, however). Or astronomy turned to long-baseline approaches instead of larger telescopes.

Alternatively, more supercomputer centers with more room for researchers?

Mar 10, 2024 at 8:16pmWeb