I'm surprised that this has so few upvotes 7 hours after being posted, the potential implications are big and it is clearly worth further research. There's still the possibility that DoD funding is less indicative of US technology policy/priorities than government R&D spending as a whole, but I wouldn't put too much stock in that (e.g. the DoD money could be the 20% of the money that does 80% of the results, or at least 80% of indication of US technology priorities/steering).
Have you considered posting this on EAforum? There seems to be more interest in policy there, even if the average EAforum user is less reliable than the average lesswrong user.
I'm surprised that this has so few upvotes 7 hours after being posted
Could be because I posted it in California's late evening. Btw, lightcone, if you still haven't addressed biased scoring due to the timing of posts, that would be really pathetic, and you need to.
Relatedly, I urge you to trial sorting new posts according to prediction markets over their eventual score ratios instead of continuing with a system where early scores (and so, also, eventual scores) are basically random.
Have you considered posting this on EAforum?
I'd want to see it investigated a bit more, first. I'm not sure whether this reflects a broader prioritization of compute in DoD or if this awards process was just in a quirky mood, or if academic research already has this focus, there are probably more thorough investigations into DoD research interests out there.
I also don't have a good intuition for whether this kind of blue sky research leads anywhere, this could just be representative of the least efficient part of the DoD or something and we might still expect most progress to come out of industry.
I also don't think there are AI people who hang out in the EA forum and not lesswrong.
I think one reason for the low number of upvotes was that it was not clear to me until the second time I briefly checked this article why it mattered.
I did not know what DoD was short for (U.S. Department of Defense), and why I should care about what they were funding.
Cause overall I do think it is interesting information.
Viktor has a point here - the title is informative, but not well optimized (perhaps intentionally) for attracting eyeballs.
Something akin to:
Military and AI Compute: DoD's 100 million cheque and what did it get for them?
Might do the trick a bit better.
"perhaps intentionally" I was going to concede no it wasn't intentional, but your suggested title complicated that a bit, I definitely would not want to use that title, xD we need to be careful to avoid making arms-racey declarations.
Suggests interesting things about what the Department of Defense is focusing on, so I thought I should mention it.
The awards concerned "pursuing basic research spanning multiple scientific disciplines", which makes it pretty interesting that three fifths of them are either directly AI and compute hardware research, or have applications to compute hardware research.
Take a look at the table of project topics. Bold means probably directly AI/compute, italic means probably primarily applicable to AI/compute.
There are multiple entries in computing with biological substrates.
The materials science stuff, "Polariton Chemistry", "Reimagining Atoms and Photons in SYnthetic, DYnamical, and INteracting Quantum matter", etc, this does all seem to be gesturing towards potential applications in compute hardware, and that's where I'd expect any potential applications to concentrate in practice?
I wonder how these projects have progressed over the past year.