[Smerity]

The state of Australia's national science initiatives and the projects they support have always been of concern to me. There are bright spots but they seem overwhelmingly destined to be extinguished or flee.

That the team members can only decide between AI projects or being sacked is insane. And that's coming from someone in the damn field of AI. If Australia decided to hard core focus and "go all in" on AI then _maybe_ you could (very poorly) justify bleeding dry all other fields of innovation - but the recent Australian budget threw $124 million AUD vaguely at "AI" and called it a day. That's only $96 million USD and represents 3-4 large AI startup raises of capital but over more years and with usage limited by red tape and bureaucracy.

The saddest thing re: "AI or sack" is that I could list many promising AI projects from the CSIRO's NICTA (precursor to Data61) about a decade or so ago that had their support slowly strangled just like seL4. Some of those projects survived regardless and many went on to be central figures in the now hyped AI field - except they had to move overseas ...

Australia's national science initiatives seem to have neither the capital outlay / flexibility to compete with startup / commercial R&D for chasing hype nor the attention to fund and champion the projects that might build the promising scientific advances of tomorrow.

If you only swim at the wave when you see it appear you'll always be behind ...

(echoing content from my tweet: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/1395694815291985921)

[Olumde]

Sounds scaringly similar to the ludicrous mass redundancies imposed on the pure mathematics department at the University of Leicester, in order to create funds for AI.

And pray tell on what foundations the field of machine learning and AI is built on? https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/nf5r5o/the_pure_math_...

I find the blind show-me-the-money approach to funding research is baffling, in light of evidence about how research in fields/subjects such as neural networks[1] and mRNA[2] that fell out of favour for many years were eventually proven to be valid and of tremendous use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3#Career

[toomanybeersies]

> The state of Australia's national science initiatives and the projects they support have always been of concern to me

That's because technology companies generally don't make political donations or engage in lobbying, unlike the banking, gambling, and mining industries, and trade unions.

[mrslave]

>technology companies generally don't make political donations or engage in lobbying

I'm pretty sure they do, but their primary concerns are getting their piece of the foreign worker visa pie, resisting further industry regulation, and corporate tax. It is definitely not supporting local universities in either the quality of their undergraduate programs or post-grad research.

[opnitro]

This is not true. [https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/microsoft-corp/summary?id=D...]

[toomanybeersies]

I should've clarified, I was meaning in the context of Australian politics. A lot of Australian tech companies actually ban political donations as part of their anti-bribery and corruption policies.

If you look at donation data from the Australian Electoral Commission, there are no donations from tech companies [1]. The majority of donations are from banks, property developers, and mining companies.

[1] http://democracyforsale.net/search-aec/