Comment by roblabla
6 days ago
You say this as if ad revenue is the only possible way we could have done AI research - which is an _extremely_ weird take given the history of academia and R&D. Today adtech companies just make up the richest companies in the world, so it's not very surprising that they're the ones behind LLMs - they have more money to throw at the problem than most. I'm pretty confident that - if adtech companies didn't exist, we'd find other means of funding AI research (private investment, public funding, R&D spend from non-adtech companies, etc...).
When the internet was researched and developed, it wasn't funded by adtech, and yet it managed to develop it just fine.
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Also, the point of GDPR wasn't to reduce the number of ads. It was to prevent massive, indiscriminate information gathering. Now, whether that was successful or not is debatable - I have my own gripes on GDPR enforcement (I really hope the banners will get nuked out of existence).
I think the weird take is to assume it could have been otherwise when almost all the work was ad funded. It's not a coincidence it was Google and Facebook doing the research, IMO. Universities did a bit but like usual with academia the moment it benefited from large scale engineering to make progress they lost out to commercial labs.