Private money spent on applied AI doesn't replace public money being cut from basic research into AI -- or anything else.

Already, the centers of the deep learning universe are in Toronto and London, neither of which is in the United States. France is starting to have a competitive advantage in climate science by promising American scientists the French won't strangle their funding forever, thus exerting a brain drain.

The United States can either feed its brains at the K-12, university, and research science levels, or those brains will go work for someone who promises to fund them and let them do their jobs.

> The United States can either feed its brains at the K-12, university, and research science levels, or those brains will go work for someone who promises to fund them and let them do their jobs.

Just a datapoint to support that statement. There was a drop of 3% and accelerating in first-time international students going to college in the United States. Similarly, the number of American students electing to study abroad increased by 4%. The US has long been a place that valued smart, aspiring people in the nation and from around the world, it looks like more students early in life are putting down different bets for their futures.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-international-stude...

Well, I know that if I was applying to school these days rather than ten years ago, I'd be applying to Canadian schools over most of the non-elite American institutions.

My alma mater has had to shorten its semester by something like four or five weeks since I was there, due to state-level austerity. This kind of thing has become normal at public universities across the USA, so your "cheap" (ie: ~$14k/year) in-state tuition is now buying strictly less education. Research is centralizing to the most elite institutions, or going abroad. There was a government shutdown in 2013 that literally cut off the flow of already awarded NSF funding into academic coffers.

Meanwhile, Canada considers $10k/year for tuition to be expensive, and hasn't cut everything to the bone. Australia and New Zealand are similar. Parts of Continental Europe have dirt-cheap degree programs (on the order of $5k/year, even for foreigners), some of which are conducted in English, and others of which require you to speak the language.

If you do take a high-quality degree abroad, you can either subsequently apply for a work permit and enjoy better basic labor provisions than you'd usually get in the United States (cheap health-care and lengthy vacations as defaults), or come back to work at a high-paying American job if you can get one. It's a more diversified portfolio, you could say.

This has gotten to be a serious rot, like mushrooms growing out of a dead tree. The USA has gotten too used to importing its STEM professionals by brain-draining countries who seriously invest in education, and itself radically under-investigating in both STEM professionals and skilled tradespeople. You can't run a First World economy on nothing but low-level laborers, asset managers, and business owners.

I mean, sure, if someone has to do the real work but nobody does the real education, that probably means that us personally who got educated and trained in the "good old days" will have more bargaining power for salaries, but we'll also face a "hole" in the labor market of suitable juniors to train.

There are 55 million people in elementary/middle/high school in America, and 20 million in a college or university.

Google employs 74,000 people, so, there are a thousand times more students than Google employees, and obviously not all of those employees are working on AI; I assume most of them are sales & admin.

Facebook employs less than a third of that at 20,000.

A drop in the ocean compared to all the students that are being chronically underserved and undereducated.

The "Divide" in the US is Inner-City Schools and poor Rural Schools. If you look at the rest of America's schools they are among the best in the world. If you take just Massachusetts scores they one of the top 5 in the world. http://www.doe.mass.edu/news/news.aspx?id=24050

The big issue is how we fund schools. It is based on the value of your home divided by the number of children that lives in said homes. Since the richer you are the less children you have they get more money. http://www.economist.com/node/21561112

Until we take the funding of school's to the state level we can talk till we are blue in the face and we will continue to have a "Divide." I don't understand why the AARP and other groups don't jump on the bandwagon and remove the burden of school tax off the backs of fixed income home owners. Fair funding is the foundation that will happen only if the US Court System steps in, because I can't see this happening any other way.

For Pennsylvania they have the biggest gap in the nation with the poorest Charter School Law in America. http://fairfundingpa.org/resources/infographics/

>The "Divide" in the US is Inner-City Schools and poor Rural Schools. If you look at the rest of America's schools they are among the best in the world.

There's another way to put that: America's well-off suburbs have very good schools, but most of America does not. We need some numbers on the concentration of school-age children into good suburban districts versus "bad" inner-city and rural districts.

THis is as good as I can find:

http://hechingerreport.org/struggling-cities-and-excelling-s...

The issue is defining suburbs. Usually it is Rural vs City (Which includes suburbs)

It might be possible to find a ballpark estimate by the number of poor children.

Guys, they're talking about the debasement of "human learning"... Machine learning is another subject. :-)