I have been in and out of the academic world my entire career. I have worked as a programmer/engineer for two universities and a national lab, and worked at a startup founded by some professors. There is huge uncertainty with the people whom I have worked with, nobody seems to be sure what is going to happen, but it feels like it wont be good. Hiring freezes, international graduate students receiving emails to self deport, and at my last institute many people's funding now no longer supports travel for attend conferences (a key part of science!).
One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment. At one point I was paid from a government grant to do high power laser research. Of course there were goals for the grant, but the grant was specifically funded so that the US didn't lose the knowledge of HOW to build lasers. The optics field for example is small, and there are not that many professors. It is an old field, most of the real research is in the private industry. However what happens if a company goes out of business? If we don't have public institutions with the knowledge to train new generations then information can and will be lost.
The irony is that in their supposed effort to "Make America Great Again" they're going to end up accelerating China's rise. We may have decided that basic research is no longer something we want to do, but China's going to continue to forge ahead and leave us in the dust. All thanks to people who have no understanding of how anything works, but only want to tear things down that they don't understand.
tbh I don't know if many senior leaders in the admin that actually think these policies are going to make anything better. It just seems like a mass looting project. Lutnick, for example, is definitely a wall street insider and is under no illusions that any of these policies benefit the nation.
If you look at the agenda it's all cultural wars stuff (smoke screens) and wealth transfer to the rich.
They understand this, most educated people understand this, it's just his base that is in the dark.
No this is what most of their supporters genuinely believe. They think people working in a factory generate more real economic value than people working in offices.
One piece of evidence would be that Russia, Belarus and North Korea have been specifically excluded from US tariffs. You could argue that the net effect is negligible since we don't import a lot from those countries, but the signal being sent to long term allies is devastating to America's future relations with them.
Iran is on the tariffs list because of Trump's maximum pressure policy (an official National Security Memorandum) against Iran. This is coupled with Trump's willingness to get Russia to cooperate in the ceasefire.
I'm not claiming his administration's logic is 100% sound, only that there is an explanation that doesn't assume the rather farfetched theory that Trump is an agent for Russia.
I'm not particularly well-versed in this area, but searching for the topic on Google easily found this information on sites such as Wikipedia, WSJ, Newsweek, and whitehouse.gov.
Yes, there is a LOT of evidence of this allegiance, although maybe just observing Trump's unwillingness to openly criticize Russia and Putin is highly suspect by itself.
If you're going with the great conspiracy of GOP as Russian assets, you should also add Elon Musk and the other tech robber barons as Russian assets as well.
To be clear, I meant literally compromised. As in, their machines are pwned. The whistleblower indication of Russian IPs logging in immediately after creation of usernames/passwords is a clear indication of that.
Musk seems to just have "small dick energy", or in proper words, a very fragile ego. And he seems to hate the "woke left" for "poisoning" one of his kids' minds that came out as trans. And like a 12 year old, his ego told him that anything the left is for, he'll be against...
Is there something about Elon Musk and the other tech robber barons being russian assets as well that makes the whole notion stupid on its face? I can't tell what your point is. Are you being dismissive or do you just want to remind people about the tech robber barons as well?
I'm not sure what was supposed to have happened 20 years ago. In 2005 everything seemed great. Maybe it's a reference to post 2008, the previous time America screwed everyone over? The election that spawned austerity was in 2010, so 15 years ago.
The Russian part is even more confusing. In relation to Brexit sure, but that was 9 years ago.
The terminations so far focus on anything with any mention of a DEI related objective and that may seem "fine", but these don't constitute a lot of the NSF's budget (the terminated grants total < $1 billion and if you click through them you'll see that for many, that's 5 years of funding). The planned cuts are much deeper[1], DEI is just not where the "big bucks" are.
In case anyone else has the same memory fuzziness I had that led me to thinking "I could've sworn it was ARPA, not DARPA, that the internet came out of"... it was ARPA, but they aren't separate organisations as I for some reason thought they were. To quote Wikipedia:
> "The name of the organization first changed from its founding name, ARPA, to DARPA, in March 1972, changing back to ARPA in February 1993, then reverted to DARPA in March 1996"
Also, NCSA was started with NSF funds and the put out the first web browse. And now the guy behind that is supporting Trump. Really pulling up the ladder.
It has links to some of the panel reports that led to the founding of NCSA, but the OSTI website has been having intermittent 502s for me this morning.
The original "black proposal" was online on the NCSA website, but seems to have been missed in a website reorg; wayback has it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161017190452/http://www.ncsa.i... . It's absolutely fascinating reading, over 40 years later.
It's also a relatively fragile pipeline. People can't just wait a few years when they hit transition points; universities have already massively curtailed their enrollment for the incoming graduate class because of their attempts to completely shut off grants both new and existing, new PhDs are going to have a tough time getting Post Doc positions and post docs are going to have a hard time getting faculty positions. All those people need jobs so they'll have to either find temporary work and hope to get back on the track after that (competing against all the people who had to do the same over the next 4 years unless they're stopped soon) or go overseas.
Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for driverless cars, and now America is a leader in the industry.
And it needed to happened because the state of American robotics was sad in 2004; the very first challenge was a disaster when all the cars ran off the road, with zero finishing the race. Top minds from MIT and Stanford got us that result. But they held the challenge again and again, and 20 years later we have consumers making trips in robo taxis.
e.g. Kyle Vogt, participated in the 2004 Grand Challenge while he was at MIT, went on to found Cruise using exactly the techniques that were developed at the competition.
So while Elon Musk is busy slashing whatever federal spending he can through DOGE, it's only because of federal spending that he can even fantasize about launching a robot taxi service.
America the leader in the driverless car industry? Not entirely sure it is still true. At least might not be true much longer. China is already building EVs en mass and some of them have, according to some people I met at least, better self-driving capability.
Well that is a goal post. They can do it doesn’t matter if they are allowed to or not. My friends tesla I’ve seen it in action. It goes on the highway. It goes on all the streets even hilly ones unlike waymo. It can even find a free parking spot in the lot and fully park the car. All while he does nothing at all with his hands on his lap. So yeah it totally can self drive.
If that's how you're using it, then you're doing it wrong, because you're supposed to be supervising the drive the entire time. It's not self-driving if you're supervising. And you're required to supervise because... they're not confident it can actually self-drive.
where did i say i wasn't supervising? Are you saying the self-summon is the unsupervised part? Cause i can flip that logic on it's head and say, if they weren't confident that it can summon to me, why would they implement the feature?
The charge is that Tesla can't do self-driving successfully. If they could, you wouldn't need to supervise, as is the case with e.g. a Waymo taxi. That they require you to supervise is an admission that their system is not sufficient for self driving, i.e. they're not doing it successfully.
Waymo taxi's are always in geofenced areas with full HD maps down to the centimeter. I can't take it to tahoe like i can with my Tesla. my point is... my tesla drives itself... all the time and never have to disengage. People can shout technicalities all the time, and regulations where tesla fails because it "Doesn't have an operator that can take over" but for all intents and purposes, my car drives itself from my door to tahoe and back without me having to take over a single time.
If that's not full self driving, but waymo's geofenced, $45 for a ride down the street is, we just disagree.
What you mean is for your intents and purposes. Others in the thread have pointed out specific intents and purposes for which Tesla's approach fails -- driving when you don't have to pay attention. Which is the core function of self-driving, so not being able to do it is kind of whole thing.
> If that's not full self driving, but waymo's geofenced, $45 for a ride down the street is, we just disagree.
Geofenced or not, self driving is about not having to pay attention while the vehicle is in motion. If you have to supervise it, that's a very different thing from a system that will all you to looking at your phone or sleep.
Tesla's approach of trying to drive everywhere instead of a geofenced area is part of why their system is failing to deliver self driving.
Trying to do one thing well before expanding the performance envelope is good systems engineering practice. But Tesla has been widely testing their systems on the greater public, which has tragically resulted in deaths. This is why at the end of the day Tesla requires you to supervise their system while you operate it.
Are the Teslas in the Vegas Boring Loop still driven by humans? If so, how is it that Tesla seems unwilling to assume liability for what has to be one of the simplest driving tasks?
If it crashes, it's my fault. At every point i'm supervising.
Except in self summon, and if it side swipes the car on the way out, it's obviously still my fault. That's just never happened to me.
Where in my sentence did i say I wasn't fully in control of the situation? I just say i very, very rarely even have to disengage in situations.
On the very rare occassion that i do disengage, it's not really that the car is going to put me in a life threatening situation, it kinda just stops... and tweeks out a bit. Mainly at some super wierd triangle intersection in some of the small towns along the california coast.
Honestly i've come to "feel" the car after using it. I'll disengage if i even have a shadow of a doubt it's not going to work, and in situations where i've seen it "fail" before. It might have accomplished it, but instead i just drive through the wierd intersection and reengage.
This has already turned into a rant, but one last point; Have you driven in the other cars in Austin? They do the same thing. When it tweaks, or thinks it might tweak, they patch over to a human who takes control of the car.
Why don't you add anywhere to that list? If the car drives itself, why is it geofenced into only places google has HD mapped down to the centimeter. My car can drive itself to Tahoe, can a waymo?
Waymo's strategy is to be extremely cautious and slowly improve the system and increase its scope over time with the goal of establishing self-driving cars as a long-term viable solution. They know they need to increase the trust of many people. Therefore, they geofence to locations where they have an understanding with the local politicians and government, near support facilities, and high quality data.
Tesla chose a different strategy. It's hard to collect enough data to know exactly how safe it is.
That is the difference between "safety first" and "my personal convenience first", which again boils down to insurance liability.
As long as you pay for the people you injure and kill on the way, you can let your Tesla drive you anywhere, even if it can't do it. You can let it try, and maybe it fails. That's totally fine. You will be held liable, but you get to enjoy your trip to Tahoe.
Self-driving companies that have to pay for the systematic faults of their systems will usually move different.
Because Waymo is not stupid enough to take liability for a situation which they aren't extremely confident about. Tesla is also not stupid; they just don't take liability period.
> Disengagements occur when the self-driving system is deactivated with control handed back to humans because of a system failure or a traffic, weather or road situation that required human intervention.
> Waymo, for example, drove 352,545 miles in the state during the period with only 63 disengagements. Cruise vehicles drove about a third less, at 127,516 miles, and had 105 disengagements.
> The third best performance came from Nissan Motor Co, which drove 5,007 miles and had 24 disengagements, meaning that its vehicles had disengagements on average every 208 miles.
Notice that Tesla isn't even included. That's because they don't actually have full self driving tests ongoing like this. Just the half-assed version they beta test with their customers on public roads.
Just curious, but if it really was up to full self driving, why don't you think Tesla would have it certified as such? Being first to market as a true self driving vehicle would be a huge business win.
I don't think it's fair to call a car self-driving if the self-driving disengages itself every time its about to get into a nasty wreck because of its own actions. It's facially "self-driving except for when it's not", the "not" times you, of course, cannot predict.
It wouldn't have survived without them though. State/Federal EV tax credits & carbon credits are government subsidies, and are not a natural product of the "free market".
It speaks volumes tho that one of his clauses was to be treated as a co-founder. He clearly has a chip on his shoulder, and his technical abilities are to be questioned. Ultimately, people choose to believe Elon is smart or a good guy (saving the environment etc.). I think he is a remarkable conman. He was able to convince remarkable engineers to work on these products under the pretext of saving the environment, while paying relatively low wages (a few years ago Tesla pay was not comparable to other car manufacturers despite its California location). Also, I find it really funny that he was illegal in the US for a few months, and currently opposes immigration the way he does. Regarldess of your views on these matters, any man that takes a piece of the pie (subsidies, immigration etc.) and denies it to the next person is either a conman or a hypocrite, or both. I think he is a conman, who knows the next person will resort to tactics similar to his, and wants to avoid it. He never cared about the environment, given he is doing everything in his power to kill other EVs and maximize his own profits. There are many skeletons in the Musk and Thiel closets, enough to fill a graveyard. Hypocrisy is truly seen as a virtue in DC
Uh. California began offering $5,000 rebates for electric vehicles in 2007, before Tesla sold its first car. It was literally a selling point touted by Tesla.
From Tesla's blog (2009): Tax incentives: Why the Roadster costs less than its sticker price
It's ironic that the much more significant ultimate success of deep learning happened despite a lack of government funding, if Hinton is to be believed. The 90s were a neural net winter, and success required faster computation, a private success.
I lose zero sleep at the prospect that there would be zero government robotics research funding. If the advantages are there, profit seekers will find a way. We must stop demonizing private accumulations of capital, "ending" billionaires and "monopolies" that are offering more things at lower cost. Small enterprises cannot afford a Bell Labs, a Watson Research, a Deep Mind, a Xerox PARC, etc.
Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey.
It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.
I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions.
I think this is a common issue in computer science, where credit is given to sexy "software applications" like AI when the real advances were in the hardware that enabled them, which everyone just views as an uninteresting commodity.
> I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions.
But the "billions" didn't precede the "millions". They're just completely incorrect, and anyone that knows even a tiny amount about the actual history can see it immediately. That's why these comment sections are so polarized. It's a bunch of people vibe commenting vs people that have spent even like an hour researching the industry.
The history of semiconductor enterprise in the US is just a bunch of private companies lobbying the government for contracts, grants, and legal/trade protections. All of them would've folded at several different points without military contracts or government research grants. Read Chip War.
You seem to be arguing that the second government touches anything then everything it does gets credited to the government funding column. Seems simplistic to me, but you can believe what you like. Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically.
Either way the fact remains that the billions spent developing GPU's preceded the millions spent to use those GPUs for AI. Not sure what it has to do with polarization of the comment section. I assume it's just people seeking an opportunity to heap abuse on anything close to a representative of the evil "other side".
> Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically.
How do you think the railroads were built in the US? The bonds of the Pacific Railroad Acts date back to the 1860s. Pretty easy to build a railway line when government foots the bill.
Government funding of research. We were talking about the NSF after all, not free markets versus central planning.
On that though, I read somewhere that the hierarchical committee-led operation of the funding agencies is the same way communist systems dole out money for everything else too. Not sure if they were being completely serious.
From 1901 up to FDR's election in 1932, 5 Americans won Nobel Prizes in the sciences. There was not much government funding back then, and not much was going on either.
So your argument is that nothing is communism? The fact that it's a single large organization allocating resources is rather key to the whole point. That the same organizational structure doing it is interesting to me anyway. I suspected this line of thinking is too triggering for some people though.
A corporation is not an economic system, just a tiny participant of one. And I'd rather describe their decision making as hierarchical yes, but by middle managers implementing the agendas of higher ups, not necessarily by committees. When they operate by committee they tend to be at their worst...
Many industries are uninvestable in their early days. How many get to the point where private funding makes sense without initial government funding for fundamental science and research? Where will we be in 15 years if the government starts pulling funding like the NSF? We might find the private money at that time is funding those future industries in other countries instead.
Seeing all the recent tariff fights and actually finding out what the story is behind some of the different industries, I am becoming much more of the opinion that other countries take over industries as the result of specific agendas targeting those industries and maintaining a large degree of monopoly over them. The US has not reacted much because each country only took one industry or so and it was a way to manipulate them or appease them or whatever, but it is turning into death by a thousand cuts. I definitely think the US government needs to be a lot more involved than they have been in a range of ways. That list of ridiculous-sounding cancelled NSF grants wasn't it though. If you're talking about the SBIR program, that is pretty tiny. I assume it will continue, it is legally set to be at 2% or whatever.
> You seem to be arguing that the second government touches anything then everything it does gets credited to the government funding column.
Absolutely not. This is an obvious bad faith interpretation of my comment.
> Either way the fact remains that the billions spent developing GPU's preceded the millions spent to use those GPUs for AI.
Again, you're just obviously completely factually wrong to anyone who has even a modicum of casual interest in the history of these technologies.
> Not sure what it has to do with polarization of the comment section. I assume it's just people seeking an opportunity to heap abuse on anything close to a representative of the evil "other side".
And one more time for the people in the back. Anyone with any amount of actual knowledge on the topic at hand can immediately dismiss your entire argument because it isn't based in anything resembling fact. It's just you wishing or hoping that it might be somewhere close to true. This is just that scene from Billy Madison: "Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
I wonder if it deals more with the approachability of software applications. If I even begin to think I’d compete with NVIDIA delivering similar hardware, I’d very quickly realize I was an idiot. Meanwhile as a single individual, there is still a reasonable amount of commercial markets of software I really do have some chance at tackling or competing against. As software complexity rises it’s becoming far less tractable than it was in say the 90s but there are still areas individuals and small sums of capital can enter. I think that makes the sector alluring in general.
Hardware is just in general capital intensive, not even including all the intellectual capital needed. So it’s not that it’s uninteresting or even a commodity to me, it’s just a stone wall that whatever is there is there and that’s it in my mind.
That difference in difficulties is kind of the point. Imagine, as an extreme, a company makes a machine with certain functions performed based on which button combinations you press. A second company gets a patent for using the first company's machine for doing various tasks by pressing various button combinations, which are new uses of the machine no one had thought of yet. Now the second company has all the bargaining power in the market and so gets giant margins, despite doing a tiny fraction of the work it takes to make those tasks possible.
I wonder if our current system ended up this way because it is the most efficient in terms of specialization, or because the patent system drove things in this direction where the people last dealing with customers (i.e., those making the software layer) have the best info of what tasks the customers want to do with their computers, and hence patent the solutions first. Leaving hardware vendors no choice but to serve the software monopolies (one after another since the 80's).
You are suggesting unilateral disarmament. Allowing other nations, not all of them friendly, to take the lead in science and technology as they continue to fund their own research and poach our best and brightest.
Once something has a predictable ROI (can be productized and sold), profit seekers will find a way. The role of publicly funded research is to get ideas that are not immediately profitable to the stage that investors can take over. Publicly funded research also supports investor-funded R&D by educating their future work force.
The provided examples do not clearly support the idea that industry can compensate for a decrease in government-funded basic research. Bell Labs was the product of government action (antitrust enforcement), not a voluntary creation. The others are R&D (product development) organizations, not research organizations. Of those listed, Xerox PARC is the most significant, but from the profit-seeking perspective it's more of a cautionary tale since it primarily benefited Xerox's competitors. And Hinton seems to have received government support; his backpropagation paper at least credits ONR. As I understand it, the overall deep learning story is that basic research, including government-funded research, laid theoretical groundwork that capital investment was later able to scale commercially once video games drove development of the necessary hardware.
Isn't that basically half the motivation for the national ignition facility? To maintain a pool experts in nuclear physics just in case the government every needs or wants to design new nuclear weapons?
Generally concur but I wish we wouldn’t squander credibility by making claims like, “travel for attend conferences (a key part of science!).”
Oh come on. Conferences are a monument to waste if ever there was. It’s all kickbacks and hotel and airline industry lobbying and protectionism. Some conferences may be better than others I’m sure, but no, science does not depend upon travel to conferences.
Science absolutely depends on people meeting and exchanging ideas. Whether that happens at a conference as they exist today is one thing, but if you don't spend money on getting people from around the world to meet and exchange ideas, you're going to lose a key aspect of the scientific process.
Couldn't find the person you wanted to argue with in the comments so you just pretended they are here and claim the community is "part of the problem" even though you couldn't actually find one of them.
It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.
The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research with no clear path to monetization.
Yes, private schools do both of these things, but in both cases they are only doing so by means of public funding.
Long-term projects with a fairly well-paved path to monetization. If industry was willing to invest in things like pure mathematics, or deep space astronomy, or just generally subsidizing smart people to investigate things they think are interesting, we wouldn’t need the NSF.
The point is that the efficiency of the private sector is a Faustian bargain: it comes at the cost of expecting an ROI for the investigators.
A small minority of the private sector is burning money on long-term investments. Another small minority are burning money on ventures which cannot be monetized. At their intersection, there exists zero companies. Yes, zero. Not close to zero, just zero. And it will always be zero.
How will you survive if what you're doing takes both a lot of time and makes no money?
Think about something like the FDA. It's a cost sink. The private sector will never do something like that because it's explicitly anti-profit.
I don’t believe so, no, but even if they were - isn’t funding private businesses to do research (that have a stake in success) better than the state doing it directly and not caring if it works or is effective or not?
You'd have to make that case. Even the naive answer would be 'no' but I can't think of a reason why a narrowly focused business is better than a government-backed enterprise when it comes to doing research. It's not worse necessarily, but it's not better either.
Please read my sibling reply about DARPA grand challenges. This knowledge was built using public dollars by people who publish papers, which are being read today by people building products. That's the great cycle of progress.
Notably DARPA felt the need to do this because they didn't trust private industry to do it on their own; with no money in driverless cars, the government figured industry would get there only if there was some catalyst, which they provided (successfully).
If you only ever go where the work is, then you're going to be left behind by societies that have a vision and leadership that will work to make it real.
That's an interesting counterfactual but it doesn't really mean much to reality. Fact is, what happened is that public research got the results where private industry did not, and everyone is better for it, including private industry. Progress doesn't wait for private industry to be certain of its profits; if it doesn't happen here, it'll happen elsewhere.
It also complete bullshit, pharmaceuticals are heavily dependent on the basic research that is done by colleges and anyone that thinks these private entities can do more research than the best universities in the planet is just insane.
For decades now the main difference between the US and the other economies is the amount of highly qualified labor across the board, this move to destroy academia and elevate the stupid and unqualified will be the end of America and the whole world will be poorer for it.
I’ve seen “behind the curtain” in both private and publicly funded research. I can’t think of a single area where private industry isn’t standing on the shoulders of collective advancement. (I speak from experience as someone who holds a degree in one of the fields I’m about to mention.)
The biggest leaps tend to be made as a result of public-private partnerships. For example, essentially the totality of fundamental knowledge relating to aeronautics and aerospace, advanced medicine and life-saving pharmaceuticals (especially drugs for orphaned diseases), and any of the examples already offered in this thread.
Private ownership of scientific knowledge isn’t inherently a bad thing, but locking it up indirectly by virtue of eliminating all public funding for it does nothing more than to invite a new corporatist driven Dark Age.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a fun place to visit on the screen. I guess some people do want to live there.
Just because you don't read the papers doesn't mean that no one does. Much of the work done in private industry is based on basic research. There are examples given in this thread: the DARPA robotics challenge, and the internet itself.
This assumes only research that can be turned into a product should be pursued. Maximizing profit is not actually a virtue, no matter how hard the business types try to say it is.
False. Mass accumulations of capital allow exploratory research without a clear path to commercial benefit, but it's a cherry on top, a kind of motivator for researchers.
[EDIT] Rather, yes, of course it's artificial, what do you mean by bringing that up? Corporations and money are also artificial, so... what does that matter? In fact, all research is artificial.
You not reading it doesn’t mean nobody reads it. A lot of things you’re enjoying NOW stands on the fundamental knowledge brought by these papers/research. You not going to school doesn’t mean the school is useless.
One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment. At one point I was paid from a government grant to do high power laser research. Of course there were goals for the grant, but the grant was specifically funded so that the US didn't lose the knowledge of HOW to build lasers. The optics field for example is small, and there are not that many professors. It is an old field, most of the real research is in the private industry. However what happens if a company goes out of business? If we don't have public institutions with the knowledge to train new generations then information can and will be lost.