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The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia

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146 points MaysonL | 2 comments | 12 May 25 02:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.575s | source
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lenerdenator ◴[12 May 25 14:16 UTC] No.43963202[source]▶
Industry determines everything by the impact it will have on its financial state in ninety days. That's it. That's what matters. We redefined competence as the ability to have that financial state be better with regard to nothing else.

Academic research rarely produces anything in 90 days.

Therefore, there will be little in the way of standing for academic research.

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1. telotortium ◴[12 May 25 14:56 UTC] No.43963771[source]▶
Yet somehow, despite strictly speaking only predicting the next token greedily according to the highest probability, LLMs are able to write coherent text across many pages now. Reflecting on why that is the case might give you an answer as to how businesses can plan over the many-year timescale.
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2. lenerdenator ◴[12 May 25 15:57 UTC] No.43964466[source]▶
"Planning" and "research" are two very, very different things.

I can "plan" to sell off the majority of my company's holdings and give all of the proceeds to shareholders over the next few years. I'd be considered a genius and have a business school somewhere named after me.

Coming up with a hypothesis, testing it, and creating a product/service based off of it with no guarantee of even a penny of monetary return is far riskier, and that's what "research" is.