Comment by throwaway2037
11 hours ago
The author's homepage: https://jiahao-shao1.github.io/
... says:
> My research aims to build a general-purpose agent that can understand, reason, and act in the physical world — at the intersection of multimodal learning, generative modeling, and embodied AI.
His tweet says:
> got tagged for "training a competitor,"
I don't get it. To me, it sounds like he is training a competitor. Do I misunderstand? Is there a Chinese equivalent LLM that he can use instead?
Also, give the national security sensitivity around AI/LLMs, I can understand why Anthropic wants to be especially cautious with mainland Chinese researchers, including those from blocked regions (Hongkong, in this case).
He's a PhD student, so a researcher. Researching how to build better AI is still research; not commercial.
Considering academic research to be competitive is an incredibly dangerous slippery slope. It didn't use to be this way; e.g. just look at the GPT-2 paper: https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_model...
The researcher is based in Hongkong, where Anthropic is geo-blocked.