Re:Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
by trashtester on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @08:41AM
(#40366142)
That funding may have felt good at the time compared to some other academic fields.
But compared to the 100s of billions (possibly trillions, globally) that is currently being plowed into AI, that's peanuts.
I think the closest recent analogy to the current spending on AI, was the nuclear arms race during the cold war.
If China is able to field ASI before the US even have full AGI, nukes may not matter much.
Re:Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
by mark_l_watson on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @09:29AM
(#40366667)
You are right about funding levels, even taking inflation into account. Some of the infrastructure, like Connection Machines and Butterfly Machines seemed really expensive at the time though.
Re:Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
by trashtester on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @09:54AM
(#40366991)
They only seem expensive because they're not expected to generate a lot of value (or military/strategic benefit).
Compare that the 6+ trillions that were spent in the US alone on nuclear weapons, and then consider, what is of greater strategic importance: ASI or nukes?
AI has a certain mystique that helps get money. In the 1980s I was on a DARPA neural network tools advisory panel, and I concurrently wrote a commercial product that included the 12 most common network architectures. That allowed me to step in when a project was failing (a bomb detector we developed for the FAA) that used a linear model, with mediocre results. It was a one day internal consult to provide software for a simple one hidden layer backprop model. During that time I was getting mediocre results using symbolic AI for NLP, but the one success provided runway internally in my company to keep going.