3 ms·

Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit. Much more real than a university.

by FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago

vkou 2y ago
Figuring out new and better ways to make the owners richer is both a real-world and chronically underfunded problem.
- segfaltnh 2y ago
  No one ever thinks of the poor owners.
llm_trw 2y ago
ML papers by Western universities barely touch on the problems that practitioners face. The only papers I see that are routinely useful have half the authors having a .in or .cn email at the end with the rest having Indian and Chinese names in US institutions. The only western papers which aren't extended advertisements for their company are from people who are making something for themselves. For example the best paper on image classification I've ever seen was posted on a private discord and was about better labeling the parts of a vagina as part of a stable diffusion training pipeline. I used the methods without change and got better than state of the art for document segmentation.
- rscho 2y ago
  Certainly, some countries have a more engineering-focused academic style. Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission.
  - motorest 2y ago
    > Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission. You can advance knowledge in ways that are aligned with the nation's strategic needs. That would imply the career path of researchers would be oriented towards industry instead of pie in the sky projects.
    - rscho 2y ago
      I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests. Universities are not political nor military entities. Additionally, pie in the sky projects is what's needed to advance science, which is very distinct from advancing technology (industry).
      - notahacker 2y ago
        Yeah. Practical working implementations of the latest in ML image classification technologies are a rapidly changing incremental improvement problem that industry is already all over, so not really surprising that this isn't a major focus for US university research: if PhDs or even potential PhDs want to do that they can get a much higher rate of pay at a private company.
      - rjsw 2y ago
        > I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests. In the UK, the industrial and military research labs have been closed, there is nothing being done except in universities. The university projects are really specific and don't join up in any way. There is no equivalent of DARPA guiding research proposals to be useful but Governments still think that the universites will define the next generation of industrial products. Source: my own area of trying to use computers for Materials Science.
- kleiba 2y ago
  All the foundational work that has lead up to the current practices in ML was done at universities. It's not like Google invented the transformer from scratch completely over night.
motorest 2y ago
> Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit. You're posting that sort of message in a startup-oriented online forum. There was a point in time where Google was lauded by it's success story as progress originating in investments in academia.

Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit. Much more real than a university.

vkou 2y ago

Figuring out new and better ways to make the owners richer is both a real-world and chronically underfunded problem.

segfaltnh 2y ago
No one ever thinks of the poor owners.

llm_trw 2y ago

ML papers by Western universities barely touch on the problems that practitioners face. The only papers I see that are routinely useful have half the authors having a .in or .cn email at the end with the rest having Indian and Chinese names in US institutions. The only western papers which aren't extended advertisements for their company are from people who are making something for themselves. For example the best paper on image classification I've ever seen was posted on a private discord and was about better labeling the parts of a vagina as part of a stable diffusion training pipeline. I used the methods without change and got better than state of the art for document segmentation.

rscho 2y ago
Certainly, some countries have a more engineering-focused academic style. Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission.
- motorest 2y ago
  > Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission. You can advance knowledge in ways that are aligned with the nation's strategic needs. That would imply the career path of researchers would be oriented towards industry instead of pie in the sky projects.
  - rscho 2y ago
    I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests. Universities are not political nor military entities. Additionally, pie in the sky projects is what's needed to advance science, which is very distinct from advancing technology (industry).
    - notahacker 2y ago
      Yeah. Practical working implementations of the latest in ML image classification technologies are a rapidly changing incremental improvement problem that industry is already all over, so not really surprising that this isn't a major focus for US university research: if PhDs or even potential PhDs want to do that they can get a much higher rate of pay at a private company.
    - rjsw 2y ago
      > I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests. In the UK, the industrial and military research labs have been closed, there is nothing being done except in universities. The university projects are really specific and don't join up in any way. There is no equivalent of DARPA guiding research proposals to be useful but Governments still think that the universites will define the next generation of industrial products. Source: my own area of trying to use computers for Materials Science.
kleiba 2y ago
All the foundational work that has lead up to the current practices in ML was done at universities. It's not like Google invented the transformer from scratch completely over night.

motorest 2y ago

> Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit. You're posting that sort of message in a startup-oriented online forum. There was a point in time where Google was lauded by it's success story as progress originating in investments in academia.