Tech-industry AI is getting dangerously homogenized, say Stanford experts

The profit motive encourages companies to punch the gas on emerging tech instead of braking for reflection and study, says Fei-Fei Li, who was the director of Stanford's AI Lab from 2013 to 2018 and now codirects HAI. "Industry is working fast and hard on this, but we cannot let them be the only people who are working on this model, for multiple reasons," Li says. "A lot of innovation that could come out of these models still, I firmly believe will come out of the research environment where revenue is not the goal." Part of the reason for all the concern is that foundation models end up touching the experience of so many people. In 2019, researchers at Google built the transformational BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) natural language model, which now plays a role in nearly all of Google's search functions.