[ifwinterco]

I am British and have no love for the US right now but in terms of talent it’s notable how many prominent researchers at the top US labs are originally European, and the contrast with the top European labs (of which there are ~none).

Does this actually matter as much as some people think? Probably not because LLMs won’t lead to AGI, but it is indicative of a broader problem

[bflesch]

US startups are trying to do a commercialization of AI, but their marketing is about being a "lab" and doing "research" - which they are not. They're trying to commercialize the hell out of the LLM approach, while fundamental research is still happening at universities.

[ifwinterco]

Fair point, but the issue I’m getting at is all too often from a European perspective the pipeline is:

Expensive publicly funded European education for 25 years -> high paid job in the US.

Costs are all paid by Europe, tax revenue and job creation all accrue to the US.

If we’re not careful it ends up being a straight transfer of value from ordinary European taxpayers to the US government which seems… suboptimal.

If the US can short circuit that process by shooting themselves in the foot, Europe will benefit

[bflesch]

Fully agree but it is still a risk for the US, because if the clever immigrants notice they can't get as rich as their American-born peers and on top of that US leadership publicly antagonizes their country of origin, those foreign-born engineers can quickly become foreign agents.

[ifwinterco]

Yes true, and the US is maybe big enough to adopt that approach.

It’s what China does (except for poaching people from Taiwan), but they have 1bn people so for them it makes sense