Serious question, who funds their research? And do any of them ever plan to work or consult in industry?
My econ professor was an “academic” and drew a modest salary while he made millions at the same time providing expert testimony for giant monopolies in antitrust disputes
Many of the academics at the top of this list are quite wealthy from direct employment, investing and consulting for big tech and venture-funded startups.
This is a really good point. I wonder if some of the antipathy to the joint statement is coming from people who are worried about open source models or small startups being interfered with by the regulations the statement calls for.
I agree with you that this cat is out of the bag and regulation of the tech we're seeing now is super unlikely.
We might see regulations for startups and individuals on explicitly exploring some class of self-improving approach that experts widely agree are dangerous, but there's no way we'll see broad bans on messing with open source AI/ML tools in the US at least. That fight is very winnable.
One who won a Turing award for somebody else's ML work and refused to give credit for it.
My understanding is that the AI needs iron from our blood to make paperclips. So you don't have to worry about this one.
This is the more realistic danger: I don't know if corporations are intentionally "controlling the narrative" by spewing unreasonable fears to distract from the actual dangers: AI + Capitalism + big tech/MNC + current tax regime = fewer white- & blue-collar jobs + increased concentration of wealth and a lower tax base for governments.
Having a few companies as AI gatekeepers will be terrible for society.
You can be cynical about corporate motives and still worried. I personally am worried about AI partly because I am very cynical about how corporations will use it, and I don't really want my atoms to be ground up to add storage bits for the number that once represented Microsoft's market cap or whatever.
But even cynicism doesn't seem to me to give much reason to worry about regulation of "next to no cost" open source models, though. There's only any chance of regulation being practical if models stay very expensive to make, requiring specialized hardware with a supply chain chokepoint. If personal devices do catch up to the state of the art, then for better or worse regulation is not going to prevent people from using them.