Before the ChatGPT moment, big tech companies and startups were already attracting some of academia’s most talented computer scientists and putting them to work on artificial intelligence. The general agreement was that academics would still be allowed to publish papers on their work. But since the AI race has heated up, publishing out of tech companies has dropped — a close-to-vest tactic that, ironically, may slow down AI progress, even as these companies spend billions on massive data centers to train and process models.
Computer scientist and entrepreneur Andy Konwinski looked at the state of computer science research and decided to put $100 million of his money into the Laude Institute, a nonprofit with a public benefit corporation aimed at funding computer science research that might otherwise die on the vine.
On the heels of Laude’s recent announcement of its first batch of “slingshots” grants, I spoke to one of its research partners, Braden Hancock, who is also the co-founder of another AI data research lab, Snorkel. I asked Hancock about the state of AI research and where we might see the next breakthroughs.