Academia

“Go work back in academia where you're underfunded. It's all like massively politicized and it's massively competitive and your labs are like held up by pizza boxes, right?”

“The thing I actually would look for is are they married to a problem or are they married to impact? Sometimes researchers are very much focused on a problem, and something about that problem fascinates them. But oftentimes it's just not a good company, or it's…”

“I still deeply believe that academic is the main source of innovation for the whole field, and particularly when it comes to biotech.”

“These innovations take so long and the discovery process can be so accidental, right, that It's perhaps not ideal for pure industry to take on, but once they show early promise, scaling them, and robustifying them, and generating data that's not only massive, …”

“Academia has a lot going for it. Access to scaled compute is not one of the things that it has going for it, or scaled resources.”

“Eventually I realized that the way to actually solve this problem was not in academia but in the industry. And to properly solve it in the industry, you'd have to start a company.”

“About opening up early on is that they always had this bet on scale. In a time where I think that was looked upon very suspiciously that, oh, if you, the thought somehow that we had all the methods already, and all you had to do was scale them up that mindset …”

“So merit double blind is the gold standard. Unfortunately, merit double blind is not the standard, right? Like it's like very, very rare. I think never does might be better than some of the crazy shit people are doing to decide who should be appointed into, es…”

“In my world, in academia, I think we have a serious problem of fraud. Of people who are very well known, and who have been very successful, and who have fudged their data, or who have committed other kinds of academic fraud.”

“You know, I think this is a really common thing in our society right now, where I think it used to be maybe 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, the smartest people who wanted to pursue the most intellectually demanding and interesting things would stay in acade…”

“And with AI, it's different where you're literally reading a paper, like, yeah, somebody's gonna implement it tomorrow and it's gonna be available. And then everyone's gonna take advantage of it.”

“I think the first schism was really during Vietnam, where people felt like they were lied to about the war. It drove a fundamental schism between academia and defense. And that we've never really healed from that schism.”

“The culture of academia could be both boringly cautious and terrifyingly competitive. Boring because it pursued incremental advances. Terrifying because scientists cut each other's throats To be the first to publish.”

“What is happening right now is that it's the Chinese companies that are publishing their work. And what then happens is all the universities, all the students and professors in our country are looking at their work and figuring out how to build on top of it. A…”

“Remember, the vast majority of academia, when OpenAI was doing their research that now has changed the world, would have thought that that would fail.”

“AI over science is just, I think, A, difficult to do in academia, and B, so exciting, but I think you can take bigger bets, and I think having a tenured position and writing research grants is maybe not the biggest bet you can take on, on a field.”

“One of the pitfalls of academia is that it doesn't really reward, like, simple ideas that work, and instead kind of tends to reward, like, kind of mathier ideas. Those mathier ideas also give you these, like, kind of implicit knobs to tune that allow you to, l…”

“Like five or 10 years ago, you really could train state-of-the-art models in the lab even with just a couple of GPUs. But, you know, because that technology was so successful and scaled up so much, then you can't train state-of-the-art models with a couple of …”

“I think the business arena is, is arguably the most competitive field in which you can test yourself of any field, even more than sports, academia.”

“Although academia was great, it would be hard to get the team together and keep them together for a long time to build this complicated machine, and Google had the money, ok?”

“A lot of the clever approaches were, that we were doing in academia were ultimately, like, nothing in the face of scale, and that, like, if I wanted to build something impactful, I felt like I needed to do it in, like, an industry setting at that time.”

“But nobody was saying anything. You know, it's like academia was silent. The startups were silent. And if anything, like, The technologists were kind of supporting it.”

“The other one that I thought was a huge omission is there's basically no real mention of academia, investing in academia. Like there's, you know, some oblique references to it, but it's just been such a mainstay of innovation, computer science. Of the last 40 …”

“There was like kind of two years where everyone in academia was working on like smaller models and none of it really mattered.”

“Academia no longer has most of the AI resources. It's very different from my time, right? The chip, the compute, and the data are kind of, are really low in, in terms of resourcing academia.”

“I mean, I do think that like the best source of evals going forward is probably going to be academia.”

“Sort of the chasm we're trying to cross here is that if you look at the state of things today, you know, academia rules, military medicine, and they do a Horrible, like totally shitty job of taking technology from the bench top to the battlefield.”

“I think academia is good for this very narrow thing of, you know, small groups, you know, trying out crazy ideas, but academia has a lot of incentives that prevent people from collaborating. And in particular in academia, there's this obsession with credit.”

“In the last few years, maybe it lasts like, you know, five, six years, like there's just, because startups have been a lot more mainstream, a lot of Folks in this demographic have gravitated towards startups as opposed to, you know, traditionally it'd be eithe…”

“And I think in general, what people do in academia that I think is not good is they choose a very simple task, like Alford, and then they apply overly complex methods and to show the improved two percent I think like you should probably match, you know, the le…”

“Places like Google and Meta, OpenAI, we will be working on things, like, Three years ahead of everybody else, and then suddenly, like, then Academia would be, like, still working on, like, these task-specific things.”

“My view is that I think academia probably should work on some different questions from what industry is good at, right? So if we are just only working on how to scale up the system, then obviously the incentive is not right. The, we don't have enough capital t…”

“But for people in academia who have more time than money, they're getting completely frozen out of research. You can't do it. There's not enough money in all of academia to participate anymore in AI research”

“And by the nature of the rapid pace of change in the technology and the nature of the engagement of those institutions, even academics, even academia broadly kind of are out of touch. The tools that you got from those places weren't useful in our field.”

“And even nowadays, like, you know, it's increasingly hard to get those GPUs in academic positions. And so it's making increasing amounts of sense for, I think the flight that we're seeing from academia to industry.”

“Normally we talk about how empowered VCs and especially tech leaders are to speak their mind and the truth and how hemmed in politicians are. But in this instance, with this situation, we're seeing the opposite, which is, you know, Biden can say the right thin…”

“It's just, like, it's a weird point we are in history where, like, yes, there are these science fiction futures, but they're not coming from academia. They're not coming from non-profits. They're not coming from the government. They are coming from a handful o…”

“And now today I think it's the dynamic is, is quite different because it's no longer academia's job isn't just to get things to work because you can do that in other ways. There's a lot of resources going into big tech companies where there's if you have data …”

“Academia as of now has just completely lost the battle. In AI research and development, the darker dots, and this is a long time scale at the bottom, show that in the early years of the current wave, a lot of the research came out of academia, but today it's p…”

“I wouldn't have left academia if I didn't think that this had to be solved in the private sector.”

“The way that our system is based is academia study something. They write up a paper, the media reports on it, and then the government regulates on that basis. It, that is the sense in which our society is based on quote science. And if you think about it, almo…”

“The currency in industry is, is money or financial, and the currency in academia is credit. And it just leads to interesting incentives. There's a lot of competition. People aren't kind of rowing the same direction all the time. You're trying to take credit ma…”

“I think academia has this illusion that it can, it's going this way as the only Force, but there's a strong feedback loop.”

“And that before you could get to the public intellectual side, you'd have to spend at least 20 years, you know, kind of being a very, very, very focused and narrow scholar”

“Like people underestimate, particularly in the U S but also elsewhere, how similar being a professor is to being a startup, like a venture backed startup founder. Cause essentially what you're doing all the time is going out, grabbing money, getting the best p…”

“For academics, I, you know, we used to be able to be provocative, and in academic seminars and at conferences, we could be provocative. We could raise hypotheses that could even be, you know, upsetting to some people. But that kind of ended in the last few yea…”

“Academia, it's allowing you to do more experimentation. It's set for that. And at Berkeley, we are in a privileged position. Of course, being close to the Silicon Valley, we have a lot of feedback. From the industry. So we are very anchored in what are the rea…”

“If I go back to when I started, you know, doing this in the, you know, early eighties, that I think in academia, it was somewhat frowned upon. Of getting involved with very translational work and applied work in companies. And I don't think that that's, and I …”

“The tipping point occurred late last year when the work being done by corporate entities, which have a profit motive, became more important than the work that was being done by academia.”

“And I think that the theory we have is that that's because you kind of, you know, industry is very good at a kind of a depth search, right? Like, you know, continuing to iterate on something. But when you need to go back and fundamentally rethink how you do so…”

“Because actually when you work in academia, the results you generate don't belong to you, so I think that's kind of a common misperception that, you know, universities actually own your work, so it's often a challenge to spin those results out of the universit…”

“The startup ecosystem is certainly in a much better shape than for example, like academia, where academia is incredibly siloed.”

“And there's this pretty well-known phenomenon called the postdocalypse that Ethan Pilstein came up with, which is this concept that there's so many postdocs now and no jobs for them. So there's just nowhere for them to go in terms of staying as An assistant pr…”

“Because the reality is, you know, all innovations that come to market are through industry. So, you know, you don't see drugs on the market that came from academia. They were all, many of them discovered in the earliest phases, the basic research was done in a…”

“There's a huge degree of risk of staying in academia when you're at that stage in your career because there's no job certainty. So you're definitely like, what's going to be my next job? I don't know, I could be a postdoc forever.”

“I really feel like venture is kind of the academia of tech, right? We kind of create all these mental models for how we think the world works, and we go, we do experiments to test whether or not they're real”

“If you're an academic, your job is to try and be right, unambiguously, completely, absolutely right about something. In business, if only 30% of people do a weird thing 20% of the time, there's still a business opportunity in that.”

“I've caught myself looking to science fiction much more than to, you know, research or academia when it comes to new technology advances.”

“Industry picked up on deep learning faster than academia.”