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by boron1006 16 days ago
> Sounds terrible, but is it?

Yes

> It incentivises high-impact research

It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.

If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.