Potentially disastrous consequences underway for American innovation
- sciart0
- Apr 12
- 1 min read
Excerpt: "Nearly three months into President Donald Trump’s term, the future of American AI leadership is in jeopardy. Basically any generative-AI product you have used or heard of—ChatGPT, Claude, AlphaFold, Sora—depends on academic work or was built by university-trained researchers in the industry, and frequently both.
Today’s AI boom is fueled by the use of specialized computer-graphics chips to run AI models—a technique pioneered by researchers at Stanford who received funding from the Department of Defense. All of those chatbots? They rely on a training method called “reinforcement learning,” the foundations of which were developed with National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.
“I don’t think anybody would seriously claim that these [AI breakthroughs] could have been done if the research universities in the U.S. didn’t exist at the same scale,” Rayid Ghani, a machine-learning researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. But Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency have frozen, canceled, or otherwise slowed billions of dollars in grants and fired hundreds of staff from the federal agencies that have funded the nation’s pioneering academic research for decades, including the National Institutes of Health and the NSF.
The administration has halted or threatened to withhold billions of dollars from premier research universities that it has accused of anti-Semitism or unwanted DEI initiatives. Graduate students are being detained by immigration agents. Universities, in turn, are issuing hiring freezes, reducing offers to graduate students, and canceling research projects."