Universities Are Woefully Under-Resourced For AI Research

In front of a packed room inside the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, the leadership of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI made a plea. 

Co-director Fei-Fei Li and executive director Russell Wald told the approximately 200 congressional staffers gathered that universities today simply don’t have the resources to do basic generative AI research. The chips, data centers, and energy costs are not in scope for university budgets. And they need serious help.

“All U.S. universities combined could not build a version of ChatGPT right now,” Wald told me in an interview this week. “That’s pretty problematic.”

The dire situation is reaching a boiling point.