# Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06035 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06035/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [StarCoder: may the source be with you!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06161/) (2023)
- [C-MCTS: Safe Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16209/) (2023)
- [Surveying (Dis)Parities and Concerns of Compute Hungry NLP Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16900/) (2023)
- [Symmetric Dot-Product Attention for Efficient Training of BERT Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06366/) (2024)
- [First Tragedy, then Parse: History Repeats Itself in the New Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05020/) (2023)
- [Collectionless Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06938/) (2023)
- [Semantically Grounded QFormer for Efficient Vision Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07449/) (2023)
- [An Introduction to Cognidynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13112/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Are you an AI researcher at an academic institution? Are you anxious you are not coping with the current pace of AI advancements? Do you feel you have no (or very limited) access to the computational and human resources required for an AI research breakthrough? You are not alone; we feel the same way. A growing number of AI academics can no longer find the means and resources to compete at a global scale. This is a somewhat recent phenomenon, but an accelerating one, with private actors investing enormous compute resources into cutting edge AI research. Here, we discuss what you can do to stay competitive while remaining an academic. We also briefly discuss what universities and the private sector could do improve the situation, if they are so inclined. This is not an exhaustive list of strategies, and you may not agree with all of them, but it serves to start a discussion.