[mike_hearn]

AI research was mostly funded during the 2010s by Google (funded by ads) and FAIR (Facebook AI Research, funded by ads).

Killing off adtech didn't reduce the number of ads seen by people in Europe or make any observable difference to anyone's lives, but did help ensure a company capable of developing LLMs could not arise,

[roblabla]

You say this as if ad revenue is the only possible way we could have done AI research - which is an _extremely_ weird take given the history of academia and R&D. Today adtech companies just make up the richest companies in the world, so it's not very surprising that they're the ones behind LLMs - they have more money to throw at the problem than most. I'm pretty confident that - if adtech companies didn't exist, we'd find other means of funding AI research (private investment, public funding, R&D spend from non-adtech companies, etc...).

When the internet was researched and developed, it wasn't funded by adtech, and yet it managed to develop it just fine.

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Also, the point of GDPR wasn't to reduce the number of ads. It was to prevent massive, indiscriminate information gathering. Now, whether that was successful or not is debatable - I have my own gripes on GDPR enforcement (I really hope the banners will get nuked out of existence).

[mike_hearn]

I think the weird take is to assume it could have been otherwise when almost all the work was ad funded. It's not a coincidence it was Google and Facebook doing the research, IMO. Universities did a bit but like usual with academia the moment it benefited from large scale engineering to make progress they lost out to commercial labs.