Great, thought-provoking post. The AI research community certainly felt much more cooperative before it got an injection of startup/​monopoly/​winner-take-all thinking. Google Brain publishing the Transformer paper being a great example.
I wonder how much this truly is narrative, as opposed to AI being genuinely more winner-take-all than fusion in the economic sense. Certainly the hardware layer has proven quite winner-take-all so far with NVDA taking a huge fraction of the profit; same with adtech, the most profitable application of (last-generation) AI, where network effects and first mover advantages have led to the dominance of a couple of companies.
Global foundation model development efforts being pooled into an international consortium like ITER or CERN seems quite good to me in terms of defusing race dynamics. Perhaps we will get there in a few years if private capital loses interest in funding 100B+ training runs.
Great, thought-provoking post. The AI research community certainly felt much more cooperative before it got an injection of startup/​monopoly/​winner-take-all thinking. Google Brain publishing the Transformer paper being a great example.
I wonder how much this truly is narrative, as opposed to AI being genuinely more winner-take-all than fusion in the economic sense. Certainly the hardware layer has proven quite winner-take-all so far with NVDA taking a huge fraction of the profit; same with adtech, the most profitable application of (last-generation) AI, where network effects and first mover advantages have led to the dominance of a couple of companies.
Global foundation model development efforts being pooled into an international consortium like ITER or CERN seems quite good to me in terms of defusing race dynamics. Perhaps we will get there in a few years if private capital loses interest in funding 100B+ training runs.