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points by RetroTechie 8 hours ago | 0 comments

> and corporate labs pick it up once it reaches the point where the basics show commercial promise.

How does that work when the research team moved elsewhere? Re-hire talent? That takes time - the 1 thing you don't have in a fast-moving field like AI. Post sums it up nicely:

"Do the math—how much is it worth to halve training and inference cost given that the industry has investments approaching a trillion dollars?"

How much is these researchers' salaries, compared to what MSFT spends on compute? Chances are it's peanuts in comparison.

[–] lovich 5 hours ago

Yes but you forget that spending on compute is spending on machines that the company owns while spending on researchers is spending on other apes that trigger the social hierarchies of executives brains and who have the dreaded key word of “rights”

Companies will try to ruthlessly rid themselves of labor as long as those members of labor have agency and rights.

If someone disagrees they can convince me by explaining why a company wouldn’t choose to spend X on a machine they wholly own vs X on an employee they don’t.

There’s some room for argument that employees can do more than machines can but in the current AI zeitgeist arguing that we have machines with equivalent to human intelligence I don’t see how you wouldn’t see this coming if you believed the zeitgeist.