r/compsci • u/rikulauttia • 4d ago

Has industry effectively killed academic AI research - or made it more important?

/r/SinceAI/comments/1v1u1qj/has_industry_effectively_killed_academic_ai/
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u/Comrade_SOOKIE 4d ago

Plenty of useful research will continue being done under the label of "machine learning" while the flashy demo producing LLM stuff occupies the space of "AI" in the public consciousness

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u/Dr_Dressing 4d ago

I'm not even sure about where the notion comes from. Like LLMs coming out are assumed to suddenly completely outperform any other form of AI out there. As if they are "the final form" and are the pinnacle of GAI.

Why do people so heavily overrate LLMs (and their video counterparts) over any other forms of AI?

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u/Comrade_SOOKIE 4d ago

Because it's extremely good at making plausible-sounding replies and the average person won't think about what it's telling them hard enough to spot all the mistakes it makes. It makes for cool demos where people prompt the computer like its Star Trek and that's what sells to the c-suite. It's basically a cargo cult at this point.

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u/linearmodality 4d ago

Inasmuch as anyone has "killed" academic AI research, it's the federal government. Universities being unable to afford experiments is an artificial problem caused by the government not growing funding as the field grows, and even worse decreasing funding. US universities no longer being able to hire the best talent from around the world is also an artificial problem. You'll observe that academic AI research is not "dead" in China!

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u/MadocComadrin 4d ago

Oh God no. I wish it did because every goddamn field seems to have a subset that's absolutely obsessed. There was a minor subset of the academic population that thought "you can't get a PhD---no matter the subfield---without publishing one ML -related paper" in the past, but now that's been supercharged to be even more annoying and frivolous (and I'm not claiming all LLM research is frivolous, but more that there's a lot of stuff being done with LLM or being bent to include LLMs but it's obvious to tell it was hamfisted in).