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Nothing sad about it. Keep theorizing and academizing. It's useful. It's not nearly as useful as tinkerers building usable non-theoretical things. It's no wonde

Nothing sad about it. Keep theorizing and academizing. It's useful. It's not nearly as useful as tinkerers building usable non-theoretical things. It's no wonder that launching a rocket is more impressive and eye-catching than a guy shuffling papers. Don't dare knock down the doers, the risk-takers, the ones with skin in the game. OpenAI provides me with a real, useful tool, something that directly improves mine and many others' lives. Your papers do not have that effect on my life.

bo1024 4y ago
I don't mean to knock down doers or risk-takers. On the contrary, I'm saying don't try to compete with the doers when you're not one. > OpenAI provides me with a real, useful tool, something that directly improves mine and many others' lives. Your papers do not have that effect on my life. Of course, OpenAI's work is built directly on top of publicly-funded research papers of the past 5, 10, 50 years.
pronto-columnar 4y ago
Weirdly aggressive response. do you think technologies like gpt were developed without any academic input?
- revelio 4y ago
  Well, the core transformers/attention paper came from Google and the DNN revolution was also kicked off by Jeff Dean at Google, no? Yes, some of the very original neural net theory was laid in academia and maybe the original GAN paper came from it, don't recall, but AI academics were complaining about being unable to keep up and having their departments be raided even 7 or 8 years ago. It's not a new complaint. So this particular AI summer doesn't seem to owe much to academia.
  - kalimanzaro 4y ago
    The oddest thing about all these anti-academic takes is that OpenAI insiders and even some informed outsiders like John Carmack think of OpenAI (and google before that) as an extension of academia. The paper posted here is more akin to lower tier academics griping about R1 universities getting most of the funding (and using amoral tactics to get that funding). Seriously. OpenAI is just another R1 department (outsized corporate funding, together with an excellent devops and focussed PR team, explains all its shenanigans)
    - bo1024 4y ago
      This is completely true from a personnel standpoint. But it's worth emphasizing the difference that they don't publish transparently their biggest findings, which makes them very different from e.g. Microsoft research.
    - revelio 4y ago
      But they are not academia. To pretend they are is disingenuous. Just because a group of people do research and write up their findings sometimes, does not make them academics.

bo1024 4y ago

I don't mean to knock down doers or risk-takers. On the contrary, I'm saying don't try to compete with the doers when you're not one. > OpenAI provides me with a real, useful tool, something that directly improves mine and many others' lives. Your papers do not have that effect on my life. Of course, OpenAI's work is built directly on top of publicly-funded research papers of the past 5, 10, 50 years.

pronto-columnar 4y ago

Weirdly aggressive response. do you think technologies like gpt were developed without any academic input?

revelio 4y ago
Well, the core transformers/attention paper came from Google and the DNN revolution was also kicked off by Jeff Dean at Google, no? Yes, some of the very original neural net theory was laid in academia and maybe the original GAN paper came from it, don't recall, but AI academics were complaining about being unable to keep up and having their departments be raided even 7 or 8 years ago. It's not a new complaint. So this particular AI summer doesn't seem to owe much to academia.
- kalimanzaro 4y ago
  The oddest thing about all these anti-academic takes is that OpenAI insiders and even some informed outsiders like John Carmack think of OpenAI (and google before that) as an extension of academia. The paper posted here is more akin to lower tier academics griping about R1 universities getting most of the funding (and using amoral tactics to get that funding). Seriously. OpenAI is just another R1 department (outsized corporate funding, together with an excellent devops and focussed PR team, explains all its shenanigans)
  - bo1024 4y ago
    This is completely true from a personnel standpoint. But it's worth emphasizing the difference that they don't publish transparently their biggest findings, which makes them very different from e.g. Microsoft research.
  - revelio 4y ago
    But they are not academia. To pretend they are is disingenuous. Just because a group of people do research and write up their findings sometimes, does not make them academics.