Comment by hodgehog11

> The outcome of this 'safety' is restricting public access to AI and giving a monopoly of access to the industry.

This is unbelievably ignorant speech. I have not received a dime of any of this funding, but I do know many excellent researchers that have, and they do fantastic work. There is an unbelievable gap between theory and practice regarding the capacity of deep learning, and while great strides have been made to develop the surrounding theory, there is a long way to go. Many believe that without a concrete understanding of how neural networks properly learn concepts, we have little hope of molding them to be reliably useful. It costs money to hire researchers and develop fundamental theory.

Just because you don't understand any of that work, does not mean that it is pointless. This is fundamental research that is 20 years behind schedule.