You seem unaware that PhD students _can_ self-fund. A PhD student just needs a funding source - often that is a competed resource that the PI controls, but if you bring the money I cannot imagine any professor would turn away a bright student.
In fact, this is what fellowships, NSF research grants, etc are - they are student-specific funding that follows them throughout their PhD.
Source: I finished a PhD partially self-funded (via a combo of finding work (TA) or finding grants or fellowships to fund the RA part for a year or so)
Sorta. They pay in labor far below the market rate, and working conditions that are abhorrent. Thy also pay a massive opportunity cost depending on the field.
I loved my phd time (and honestly if I retired, I'd strongly consider going back to it at the pay it gave), i basically had to be pushed out the door my advisor telling me "you've done enough to graduate, focus on your dissertation now".
With that said, I do agree on opportunity cost to a large extent, but I've remained employed not because I'm the best software engineer (I think I'm decent, but perhaps I would have been better if as a younger person I was better trained), but because of what I did as a phd student.
Hmm I’d say that phd wage + waived tuition is probably equivalent to the remuneration you could get as a graduate. PhD students definitely pay to be there in some way, shape, or form. Only the recent 5 year academic positions look like a job, but they are longer and underpaid for the work components
I'll give you that one. I'd missed that in the article. That just seems like bad taste on Apple's part.
But still, the overall idea seems like it does more good than harm to the end user. I really don't think it is making anybody change their mind about what they ultimately type and communicate.
Bringing charges is at the discretion of the prosecutor, and the CEOs of these companies are dining with the president. Learn a little bit about how power works.
It's TBD if the major LLM manufacturers quietly agitate for and get the same sort of retroactive-immunity deal nearly all of the telephone companies got with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
With all the hype and fearmongering going on, it's not at all a sure thing that they won't.
I expect it will work in every foreign jurisdiction where the US can run roughshod over the government, spread enough FUD about reprisals should any "inconvenient" investigations be initiated, and/or promise generous foreign aid should the local government keep their police and prosecutors in line.
I mean -hell- look at what the US got New Zealand to do to Kim Dotcom... and remember that the thing he was being charged with not a crime in the country! The dollar amounts involved there are pocket change compared to what we're talking about now... so one expects the US government to be far more motivated than they were then.
The difference between math and all the other professions AI has been obsoleting is that math is actually not a useful pursuit. The tired old line about math someday discovering something that will be useful in an entirely unrelated field is mostly baloney, and the problems that mathematicians spend their years broadly have no real world applications at all. A modern day mathematician is much closer to a monk than a productive worker.
The people that deserve the jobs are Americans. It doesnt matter if a foreigner is more skilled--the American people don't want to complete for jobs in a global labor market.
Yes thanks. Much more clear that way.
Edit: The talk was given by a geeky grad student, so perhaps very forward-thinking. Was quite a departure from the usual topics like Perceptron, MiniMax, Bayesian techniques...
Yes it is, they're talking about induced demand. There are lots of resources where, when usage of the resource becomes more efficient, people end up using more rather than less.
If training and inference is hardware constrained, and you can train and server better and bigger models on the same hardware with memory optimizations, that's exactly what I would expect companies to do.
> I have this wild theory that this has not just todo with AI but with weapons production overall.
Why? Weapons are low-volume compared to commercial products, and they probably use trailing edge or weird bespoke components.
I was digging around the other day, and at least the initial versions of the Tomahawk cruise missile had the computing power of an original IBM PC. That just shows how little computing power is needed for a lot of advanced weapons capabilities.
... for what were then 'advanced' weapons capability in high-cost units produced and expended in relatively small numbers with high yield payloads.
The modern drone warfare version of expendable, high volume, high technology small units with two way communication via fibre-optic and RF jamming resistant multiple channels, and the ability to do on-device video object identification and terminal flight control when active electronic counter measures degrade operator control...
That seems like exactly the kind of gear using commodity DDR4/5 sodimm and dimm modules and literally burning them up at then end of nearly every sortie. Even if they are using much smaller units (smartphone grade RAM) it's still cooking the limited output of the global memory fab capacity, and from the fields covered in fibre-optic blankets, I think it's safe to say there is a significant volume of electronics equipment being consumed.
So yeah, AI might be ordering memory and putting it in datacenter, but eventually that material will be available for e-waste recovery (repurpose first, then recycle later). Both are competing for the same limited fab capacity.
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