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Why is this eating up NSF money / taxpayer money?! Megacaps like Google and Facebook are reaping tons of value from arXiv, i.e. (1) easy access to non-industry

Why is this eating up NSF money / taxpayer money?! Megacaps like Google and Facebook are reaping tons of value from arXiv, i.e. (1) easy access to non-industry peer attention through a respected pre-print publisher, (2) major incentive to their employees and key component to performance review cycle, ... Google itself has out-published most universities in conferences like NeurIPS for the past few years. For Google alone to match the $10m would be a drop in the bucket-- a $10m grant would be an order of magnitude less than the compensation they're paying to their own employees who make heavy use of arXiv. NSF funds are scarce, precious, and it's immensely hard for lawmakers to divert funding to NSF versus e.g. defense. One thing arXiv needs is high-quality bandwidth and Google / Facebook have tons of that. Taxpayers are already paying tons for Google's several anti-trust trials, no need waste NSF budget for something industry can very very easily solve.

perihelions 3y ago
Seems a reasonable use of NSF money to me, to promote sciences by creating a common infrastructure for organizing the world's library of preprints. It's infrastructure of a sorts, and civil government is the ideal party to fund civil infrastructure. (Isn't it?) Not random FAANG's, and I don't see why they'd want to anyway—what they'd get out of it. FAANG's aren't charities; anything they do that looks philanthropic is some kind of trap.
- choppaface 3y ago
  I’m not saying it isn’t a bad use of NSF funds, I’m saying that especially in the AI space that industry use of arXiv is large enough that taxpayers deserve to have industry foot the bill.
  - lkbm 3y ago
    I favor the "company pays tax, tax funds science infrastructure", cycle, not the "company funds science infrastructure" cycle. It reduces the risk of industry asserting influence over the infrastructure. Whether companies pay enough tax is a separate discussion, but they paid some taxes, and those taxes are now funding ArXiv. This seems like a good setup.
  - perihelions 3y ago
    But I think you have it backwards: public infrastructure exists to make it easy for industry to thrive, to create low-friction business environments. We like industry, and we want more of it. The US benefits from AI companies headquartering in its borders far more than the AI companies benefit from "freeloading" off of arxiv.org server costs. And let's not lose perspective: the stuff posted on arxiv.org is collectively like a million times more valuable than the servers themselves.
mistrial9 3y ago
there are definitely machine-learning systems that scan and read papers by topic. I have a research paper mentioning Google doing exactly that.
krastanov 3y ago
AI is a pretty recent and small part of the fields that use arxiv as a preprint server.

perihelions 3y ago

Seems a reasonable use of NSF money to me, to promote sciences by creating a common infrastructure for organizing the world's library of preprints. It's infrastructure of a sorts, and civil government is the ideal party to fund civil infrastructure. (Isn't it?) Not random FAANG's, and I don't see why they'd want to anyway—what they'd get out of it. FAANG's aren't charities; anything they do that looks philanthropic is some kind of trap.

choppaface 3y ago
I’m not saying it isn’t a bad use of NSF funds, I’m saying that especially in the AI space that industry use of arXiv is large enough that taxpayers deserve to have industry foot the bill.
- lkbm 3y ago
  I favor the "company pays tax, tax funds science infrastructure", cycle, not the "company funds science infrastructure" cycle. It reduces the risk of industry asserting influence over the infrastructure. Whether companies pay enough tax is a separate discussion, but they paid some taxes, and those taxes are now funding ArXiv. This seems like a good setup.
- perihelions 3y ago
  But I think you have it backwards: public infrastructure exists to make it easy for industry to thrive, to create low-friction business environments. We like industry, and we want more of it. The US benefits from AI companies headquartering in its borders far more than the AI companies benefit from "freeloading" off of arxiv.org server costs. And let's not lose perspective: the stuff posted on arxiv.org is collectively like a million times more valuable than the servers themselves.

mistrial9 3y ago

there are definitely machine-learning systems that scan and read papers by topic. I have a research paper mentioning Google doing exactly that.

krastanov 3y ago

AI is a pretty recent and small part of the fields that use arxiv as a preprint server.