The public of the US, China, Japan, the UK, and Canada at the very least contributed to every precursor to transformers in the history of AI. Public and private universities, government grants to them, government projects, prizes to government contests, direct government investment into and subsidies for companies doing commercial research, tax breaks to operators designed to encourage the growth of the field, and large government contracts to use things the government might not even have good uses for yet all add up to government assisted funding.
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.
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.
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.
The public of the US, China, Japan, the UK, and Canada at the very least contributed to every precursor to transformers in the history of AI. Public and private universities, government grants to them, government projects, prizes to government contests, direct government investment into and subsidies for companies doing commercial research, tax breaks to operators designed to encourage the growth of the field, and large government contracts to use things the government might not even have good uses for yet all add up to government assisted funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
The public “funded” these models in the sense of contributing to their training data.
The foundations of it, yes: "all of these were publicly or quasi-publicly funded"
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.
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.
2 replies →
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.
3 replies →