If a discipline is spending public dollars at OpenAI and Anthropic, we're funding them with extra steps. (And losing nothing somebody else couldn't do.)
So, if you have ideas of a new, better system let's talk about those, before getting happy something gets destroyed and hope someone else will come with a better solution.
So with the current system, some things work, some things don't work (ex: psychology/Alzheimer). Yes, the system should be improved. No, I am not convinced that "destroying" the current system will result very easily into something better.
We need to discuss actual solutions for the replication crisis. There are even steps towards improving that, like requiring open data for papers, which makes it harder for people to do some of the manipulations that resulted in the replication crisis. I personally would go even further: you should provide complete documentation (tools, notes, data, raw files, etc.), but then there are some people opposing that due to "privacy" (for medical) or "patents" (for industrial stuff).
The peer review system as we know it today has only really existed for less than a century. It is no how science was traditionally done. It was adopted due to some real problems with the old system, so I'm not saying we should go back. But it's not clear either that unpaid peer-review is the ultimate end-state either.
100% agreement on your last paragraph though.
AI is a special case, as academia isn't usually that lucrative. In the rest of CS, many major conferences still have ~300 people, and interesting stuff often happens in specialized meetings with fewer than 100 participants.
Academia is a specific case. It happens everywhere.
We are rendering it irrelevant. If this is the norm for academia, I’m sympathetic to the folks looking to cut its funding.