HN Explorer

Ask HN: What if we funded math research like we fund AI labs?

1 points by Murfalo ↗ HN
The annual U.S. federal budget for basic math research is <$1B.

OpenAI alone just raised ~$122B, and frontier labs are increasingly concentrating enormous amounts of compute and human talent on open math problems.

We seem to be entering a strange situation where a handful of private labs have vastly more resources for attacking these problems than the academics traditionally responsible for doing so.

Have we had the capability all along, just not the hype? Please discuss :)

1 comment

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JohnFen
That would be awesome, but it's not going to happen without some sort of huge cultural shift. It's because actual science rarely directly results in something that can be monetized. That's what engineering does. Science is about figuring out how nature works, and engineering is about how to use that knowledge to deliver some sort of useful result.

Our society revolves around profit-seeking, so readily funds engineering but has always been relatively sparing about funding science.