Comment by astrobiased
7 hours ago
This is an exciting time, but also there are very real changes at hand. Game changing discoveries will likely not happen at universities but at private AI frontier labs. Moreover, the models that are used on this are not always open to the broader community today.
What will it be like in two years? Will such models that help enable paradigm shifts in science be only accessible to employees of those private companies? Still thinking about the ramifications ... amazing and discombobulating at the same time.
You tell this as if the Universities and departments where the research happened didn’t place themselves in ivory towers.
Pedigree mattered in academia. Gatekeeping was always rampant. So to a bystander like me this makes no difference.
I disagree with that. Commercial entities are very different from Universities. They are sharing now, but they don't have to continue to share in the future, that all depends on what they find.
Apart from transformer architecture, pretty much every other discovery that makes large language models viable today happened in universities.
> Will such models that help enable paradigm shifts in science be only accessible to employees of those private companies?
The 3 breakthroughs all have implications for cryptography and nuclear technology, right? Hard to imagine nation-states allowing private companies to publish these results willy-nilly for much longer.