I love how Terrence Tao went from being AI shiller -- being a walking advertisement for openai and anthropic to a Oh nO MaThS iS KilLeD wHaT aBoUT mY JoB in a few months.
2) TFA argues golden age, provided LLM infrastructure is independent.
3) Tao just opened a new SAIR AI platform.
4) Tao just opened a journal for papers with Lean proofs.
5) Academics are known to play both sides of the fence.
It is absolutely bewildering how some people miss the finer points.
> Universities, professional societies, funding agencies, and scientific foundations should coordinate the development and governance of competitive LLMs. Scientists will need access to frontier capabilities, transparency about their operation and use of research data, strong confidentiality protections, and the ability to test and reproduce research claims independently.
> The massive computing resources, specialized personnel, data infrastructure, and ongoing investments needed to support this kind of initiative are not within the reach of a single institution, and a huge leadership effort will be necessary to conjure the combination of independent model development, guaranteed access to commercial systems, public computing infrastructure, and open research resources that could do the job.
the post is calling for....an enormous investment in LLM infrastructure.
It would be cool if some prestigious such program revamped itself to be AI-focused, maybe in collaboration with a CS department.
IMO this is probably not an accurate assessment of Tao in particular at this time.
But in the general case, I think most people have a set of blinders on that will result in a predictable reassessment of AI with the following steps as AI progresses when applied to whatever it is they do:
1) AI is useless and doesn't impact me at all. Look at how bad it is! (Most developers up until late 2025)
2) Ok, now AI is useful but will not replace me. Sucks for the juniors in the field but I am still needed to guide the AI. AI will never be capable of my judgement (or whatever). (Most developers now)
3) Oh shit, I've been replaced in terms of economically valuable utility by AI. (tbd, but likely sooner than is comfortable)
And not everyone will experience #3, there will be a top 1% or so for most fields where #3 remains true for them, but it is likely that for most people #3 comes eventually.
Then people respond: "the elite will use their ai armies to kill everyone else". This will not happen. I believe more in the worst case being chaos and rebellions. Not good for anyone, not even the elite.