alt Hacker News> Under a partnership, the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources. The foundation will manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals, to support workshops and initiatives that help researchers evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use.
The foundation was started in 1994, Wikipedia says "one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States with assets of over $5 billion in 2022" - Jim Simons founded the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund.
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So, basically they created the recent situation in math where a great deals of top mathematicians criticized their methods, even called to boycott their dumped results. And the answer of the AI labs is buying these poor academic souls with 15$ millions? Most of them even as AI tokens? Why do I see a macabre irony here?!
I see you saying a lot of intelligent things - do you really not know much about the Simons Foundation?
They also gifted $ 5m [1] to the FRO (Lean Focused Research Organization) [2].
[1] https://www.simonsfoundation.org/news/from-trust-to-verifica...
Jim Simons needed machine learning for his quantitative hedge funds. He founded this institute for computational everything:
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/flatiron/
He has invested in AI for a long time:
https://www.wealthmanagement.com/high-net-worth/family-offic...
The people here who depict him or whoever runs his funds now as a pure philanthropists are wrong. These tiny investments into academia pay off many times.
So charitable that it launches this initiative with ClosedAI and Misanthropic. There are probably accelerationist and transhumanist nutcases at this foundation.
Quanta magazine is the propaganda arm.
Can you ever look behind the surface of ... anything at all? Only naive and childlike statements in favor of AI proponents. It is literally like saying: "Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson are esteemed members of the magnanimous and generous Royal Family."
Simons Foundation also significantly funds arXiv, and also a large number of specific grants across maths and sciences. I don't think there's much agenda here.