Hmmm. I agree about “independent person”—I don’t think a lot of “independent persons” are working on AGI, or that they (collectively) have a high chance of success (with all due respect to the John Carmacks of the world!).
I guess the question is what category you put grad students, postdocs, researchers, and others in small research groups, especially at universities. They’re not necessarily “paid a ton of money” (I sure wasn’t!), but they do “work on this stuff all day”. If you look at the list of institutions submitting NeurIPS 2019 papers, there’s a very long tail of people at small research groups, who seem to collectively comprise the vast majority of submissions, as far as I can tell. (I haven’t done the numbers. I guess it depends on where we draw the line between “small research groups” and “big”… Also there are a lot of university-industry collaborations, which complicates the calculation.)
(Admittedly, not all papers are equally insightful, and maybe OpenAI & DeepMind’s papers are more insightful than average, but I don’t think that’s a strong enough effect to make them account for “most” AI insights.)
I meant “independent person” as in, someone not part of the biggest labs
(Admittedly, not all papers are equally insightful, and maybe OpenAI & DeepMind’s papers are more insightful than average, but I don’t think that’s a strong enough effect to make them account for “most” AI insights.)
Since most researchers are outside of big labs, they’re going to publish more papers. I’m not convinced that means much of anything. I could see usefulness vary by factors of well over 100. Some papers might even negative utility. I think all of the impressive AI’s we’ve seen, without any real exception, have come out of big research labs.
Also, I believe you’re assuming that research will continue to be open. I think it’s more likely that it won’t be, although not 95%.
But ultimately I’m out of my depth on this discussion.
Hmmm. I agree about “independent person”—I don’t think a lot of “independent persons” are working on AGI, or that they (collectively) have a high chance of success (with all due respect to the John Carmacks of the world!).
I guess the question is what category you put grad students, postdocs, researchers, and others in small research groups, especially at universities. They’re not necessarily “paid a ton of money” (I sure wasn’t!), but they do “work on this stuff all day”. If you look at the list of institutions submitting NeurIPS 2019 papers, there’s a very long tail of people at small research groups, who seem to collectively comprise the vast majority of submissions, as far as I can tell. (I haven’t done the numbers. I guess it depends on where we draw the line between “small research groups” and “big”… Also there are a lot of university-industry collaborations, which complicates the calculation.)
(Admittedly, not all papers are equally insightful, and maybe OpenAI & DeepMind’s papers are more insightful than average, but I don’t think that’s a strong enough effect to make them account for “most” AI insights.)
See also: long discussion thread on groundbreaking PhD dissertations through history, ULMFiT, the Wright Brothers, Grigori Perelman, Einstein, etc.
I meant “independent person” as in, someone not part of the biggest labs
Since most researchers are outside of big labs, they’re going to publish more papers. I’m not convinced that means much of anything. I could see usefulness vary by factors of well over 100. Some papers might even negative utility. I think all of the impressive AI’s we’ve seen, without any real exception, have come out of big research labs.
Also, I believe you’re assuming that research will continue to be open. I think it’s more likely that it won’t be, although not 95%.
But ultimately I’m out of my depth on this discussion.