[auggierose]

I don't think universities should become industry. I mean, that is exactly what we have industry for. If you want to be put in a pressure cooker under leadership focused on business outcomes, great, do industry.

The problem really is that universities are treated as if they have the same mandate as industry. Government people shouldn't tell a professor what kind of research is interesting. They should let the best people do what they want to do.

I remember an acquaintance becoming a professor, promoted from senior reader, and he was going to be associated with the Alan Turing Institute. I congratulated him, and asked him what he was going to do now with his freedom. He answered that there were certain expectations of what he would be doing attached to his promotion, so that would be his focus.

This way you don't get professors, you turn good people into bureaucrats.

[pjc50]

Yes. The demand for increasing control, driven by the "taxpayer's money!" lot evident in this thread, strangles almost all state-funded research because it demands to know up front what the outcome will be. Which instantly forces everyone to pick only sure-bet research projects, while trying to sneak off to do actual blue-sky research in the background on "stolen" fractions of the funding. Like TBL inventing the WWW at CERN: that wasn't in his research brief, I'm sure it wasn't something that was funded in advance specifically for him to do.

Mind you, it was evident to me even twenty years ago when briefly considering a PhD that CS research not focused on applying itself to users would .. not be applied and languish uselessly in a paper that nobody reads.

I don't have a good answer to this.

(also, there is no way universities are going to come up with something which requires LLM like levels of capital investment: you need $100M of GPUs? You're going to spend a decade getting that funding. $10bn? Forget it. OpenAI cost only about half of what the UK is spending on its nuclear weapons programme!)