Michael Nielsen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Right. Scaling is a very capital-friendly story. It actually moves some of the negotiating power from individual researchers, I think, to the centers of capital, but it is just a story. I think it’s quite interesting that, in some sense, it gives the individual researchers less negotiating power. Whether or not this is going to eventually result in a diminished ability to build personal brands and then capture value from that, I don’t know. I’m really interested, actually, to see what will happen over the next few years. It used to be that the big companies published a lot of papers very openly, and that is gradually going away. And as that goes away, it damages the individual researchers because they’re not able to build their brands publicly in that way. They’re not as easily able to say, “I am the person who did whatever.” But this is a small city. Doesn’t everyone know? I had dinner with a bunch of AI researchers last night. They all seem to know each other’s relative importance.…

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