In front of a packed room On Tuesday, inside the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., leaders of the Stanford Institute for Human-centered AI made a plea.
Co-director Fei-Fei Li and executive director Russell Wald told the roughly 200 assembled members of Congress that today’s universities simply do not have the resources to conduct fundamental research in generative AI. Chips, data centers and energy costs do not fit into university budgets. And they need serious help.
“All the universities in America put together couldn’t make a version of ChatGPT right now,” Wald told me in an interview this week. “It’s quite problematic.”
The dire situation is reaching a boiling point.