Srinivas: Academic researchers will be priced out of AI reasoning research
Aravind Srinivas · Aravind Srinivas:Will Foundation Models Commoditise & Diminishing Returns in Model Performance|E1161 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jun 5, 2024 · at 17:21
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, explains how high inference compute costs for iterative AI reasoning favor well-capitalized corporations over academia.
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“I see is this is a game that won't be played by academics like before, because just to do the inference compute, to do all these reasoning, like getting an output, going back and reasoning building a rationale, then going back and getting another output, just to even do this process takes you a lot of inference compute. You have to pay money for this. And so even a single experiment costs you a lot of money until you arrive at the truth of the algorithm. And then that algorithm to run it is going to cost you a lot of money to get all the data, synthetic data to train on. So I feel like this is where companies with a lot of capital are going to be way more advantaged to pursuing this research.”
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