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How does work like this get funded? It's awesome, but it seems so far removed from... let's say "profit". And there are several teams competing in these things.
by phkahler 5y ago
How does work like this get funded? It's awesome, but it seems so far removed from... let's say "profit". And there are several teams competing in these things. Are there places that really fund advanced work like this, or is it mostly graduate student underpaid labor?
- dekhn 5y agoMost of the US researchers who do CASP are funded by NIH or NSF. Some are funded by private foundations, or are independently wealthy. Typically, as a "principal investigator" (postdoc, professor, scientist at a national lab) you write a proposal saying "here's my preivous work, here's the next obvious step, plz give monies so I can feed the dean's fund and pay for my grad students to manage my modest closet cluster". A group of your competitors then trashes your proposal in a group and if you've properly massaged the right backs, you get a pittance, which permits you to struggle to keep up with all your promises.
- infogulch 5y agoYikes that sounds bleak.
- cing 5y agoYet, there were still 136 human teams who competed in CASP14 (https://predictioncenter.org/casp14/docs.cgi?view=groupsbyname https://predictioncenter.org/casp14/docs.cgi?view=groupsbyna...), including DeepMind. Even if a significant fraction of these projects were done piggy-backing another grant, this work does receive research funding.
- dekhn 5y agoBe fair. Many of those rows contain duplicate names (identical teams), so the count is much smaller.
- seventytwo 5y agoGovernment funding (eg. DARPA) or from large corporations that have skunkworks teams (Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc.)
- fswwi 5y agoIt's just corporations burn money to show off. https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/27/deepminds-big-losses-and-the-questions-around-running-an-ai-lab/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/27/deepminds-big-losses-and-...