Absolutely, industry and its neverending piggy bank have had a severe distorting effect on the direction of research. I'm a post-doc btw, right now working on robotic autonomy. I don't have direct experience of the brain drain- I'm in a UK university- but I can see the obvious results in the published research which has very suddenly lurched towards LLMs recently, as it did a very sudden lurch towards CNNs after 2012 etc.
Like you say, large tech corps clearly see big data approaches as a moat, as a game that they can play better than anyone else: they got the data, they got the compute, and they got the millions to hoover up all the "talent". Obviously, when it's corporations driving research they are not going to drive it towards a deepening of understanding and an enriching of knowledge, the only thing they care about is selling stuff to make money, and to hell with whether that stuff works or not and why. I'm worried even that this is going to have a degrading effect on the output of science and technology in general, not just AI and CS. It's like a substantial minority of many fields of science have given up on basic research and are instead feeding data to big neural nets and poking LLMs to see what will fall out. This is a very bad situation. Not a winter but an Eternal Summer.
Hot girl summer is cancelled we got hot GPU trying to bear the weight of humanity's hopes and dreams as they collapse into a single point summer
Hot market forces treated as inevitable as the ever-rising tides summer
Hot war with nuclear powers looming as a possibility on the world stage even as one such power's favored information warfare strategy of flooding all communication channels with noise becomes ever more indistinguishable from those channels' normal state summer
In a mad world, heavy metal oscillates between states of catharsis and prophecy
Anyway I really appreciate your taking the time to respond thoughtfully and am trying to channel your patient approach in my endeavors today. Hope your summer's going well, despite the looming threat of its eternity
Like you say, large tech corps clearly see big data approaches as a moat, as a game that they can play better than anyone else: they got the data, they got the compute, and they got the millions to hoover up all the "talent". Obviously, when it's corporations driving research they are not going to drive it towards a deepening of understanding and an enriching of knowledge, the only thing they care about is selling stuff to make money, and to hell with whether that stuff works or not and why. I'm worried even that this is going to have a degrading effect on the output of science and technology in general, not just AI and CS. It's like a substantial minority of many fields of science have given up on basic research and are instead feeding data to big neural nets and poking LLMs to see what will fall out. This is a very bad situation. Not a winter but an Eternal Summer.
Take it away, Tom.
https://youtu.be/0qjCrX9KS88?si=CEXr0cv-lUeG4UNO