A pointed exchange between Princeton professor Mengdi Wang and researcher Pasquale Minervini lays bare the split over whether frontier AI work can still happen without industrial data centers; Minervini points to his ICLR 2021 award-winning complex query answering paper whose full set of experiments finished overnight on one GPU and whose follow-up was accepted at ICML 2025, while Wang counters that meaningful progress now demands compute universities rarely possess.
@YiMaTweets I wish I can say same thing, but tbh it just become impossible to do research without compute
I’m getting increasingly annoyed by young people complaining that they cannot do AI-related research unless they join big industrial labs… well, here is my reply: academia is supposed to work on ideas that money cannot buy!
Minervini’s recent arXiv work shows many CQA test queries collapse into simple link prediction, so models that look state-of-the-art may not be solving the multi-hop reasoning the field claims to measure.
Wang’s replies underscore that academic groups without industry partnerships face shrinking options, leaving open whether single-GPU results like Minervini’s can scale to the next generation of harder benchmarks.
Some users lament funding pressures that force AI researchers into trending LLM work instead of pursuing cooler, more innovative problems.
you could run all experiments in our "outstanding paper award" ICLR 2021 paper overnight on a single GPU, and the method is still SOTA in that field (see our ICML'25 follow-up) -- you don't have to be in a frontier lab to do cool stuff and have an impact
I’m getting increasingly annoyed by young people complaining that they cannot do AI-related research unless they join big industrial labs… well, here is my reply: academia is supposed to work on ideas that money cannot buy!
@YiMaTweets Most of the labs working on cool non-LLM AI pivoted to work on bog-standard LLM problems because of funding
I’m getting increasingly annoyed by young people complaining that they cannot do AI-related research unless they join big industrial labs… well, here is my reply: academia is supposed to work on ideas that money cannot buy!
Paper: https://iclr-conf.medium.com/announcing-iclr-2021-outstanding-paper-awards-9ae0514734ab#3bf5 Follow-up: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12537
you could run all experiments in our "outstanding paper award" ICLR 2021 paper overnight on a single GPU, and the method is still SOTA in that field (see our ICML'25 follow-up) -- you don't have to be in a frontier lab to do cool stuff and have an impact
@YiMaTweets Academia is supposed to work on ideas that money cannot buy, but we need money to buy compute to verify the idea.
I’m getting increasingly annoyed by young people complaining that they cannot do AI-related research unless they join big industrial labs… well, here is my reply: academia is supposed to work on ideas that money cannot buy!
@YiMaTweets AI is pretty broad. They can't do LLM-related research without compute.
I’m getting increasingly annoyed by young people complaining that they cannot do AI-related research unless they join big industrial labs… well, here is my reply: academia is supposed to work on ideas that money cannot buy!
@jsuarez @YiMaTweets Sad times that instead of working on cool problems they have to accept doing whatever is trending at a given moment.
A pointed exchange between Princeton professor Mengdi Wang and researcher Pasquale Minervini lays bare the split over whether frontier AI work can still happen without industrial data centers; Minervini points to his ICLR 2021 award-winning complex query answering paper whose full set of experiments finished overnight on one GPU and whose follow-up was accepted at ICML 2025, while Wang counters that meaningful progress now demands compute universities rarely possess.
@YiMaTweets I wish I can say same thing, but tbh it just become impossible to do research without compute
I’m getting increasingly annoyed by young people complaining that they cannot do AI-related research unless they join big industrial labs… well, here is my reply: academia is supposed to work on ideas that money cannot buy!