[ponow]

It's ironic that the much more significant ultimate success of deep learning happened despite a lack of government funding, if Hinton is to be believed. The 90s were a neural net winter, and success required faster computation, a private success.

I lose zero sleep at the prospect that there would be zero government robotics research funding. If the advantages are there, profit seekers will find a way. We must stop demonizing private accumulations of capital, "ending" billionaires and "monopolies" that are offering more things at lower cost. Small enterprises cannot afford a Bell Labs, a Watson Research, a Deep Mind, a Xerox PARC, etc.

[regularization]

Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey.

It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.

[absolutelastone]

I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions.

I think this is a common issue in computer science, where credit is given to sexy "software applications" like AI when the real advances were in the hardware that enabled them, which everyone just views as an uninteresting commodity.

[standardUser]

You are suggesting unilateral disarmament. Allowing other nations, not all of them friendly, to take the lead in science and technology as they continue to fund their own research and poach our best and brightest.

[jpeloquin]

Once something has a predictable ROI (can be productized and sold), profit seekers will find a way. The role of publicly funded research is to get ideas that are not immediately profitable to the stage that investors can take over. Publicly funded research also supports investor-funded R&D by educating their future work force.

The provided examples do not clearly support the idea that industry can compensate for a decrease in government-funded basic research. Bell Labs was the product of government action (antitrust enforcement), not a voluntary creation. The others are R&D (product development) organizations, not research organizations. Of those listed, Xerox PARC is the most significant, but from the profit-seeking perspective it's more of a cautionary tale since it primarily benefited Xerox's competitors. And Hinton seems to have received government support; his backpropagation paper at least credits ONR. As I understand it, the overall deep learning story is that basic research, including government-funded research, laid theoretical groundwork that capital investment was later able to scale commercially once video games drove development of the necessary hardware.