AI professors are negotiating the new realities of academic research

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Last week, I headed 30 miles south of San Francisco to a hotel in Mountain View, California, to join some of the most accomplished, and some of the most promising, AI researchers in the world. I was hosting roundtable interviews and speaking at a media training for a convening of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 program, an initiative funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that supports academics whose work involves AI. The fellows list is a who’s who of AI luminaries, and though not all of them made it out to the Bay, every time I turned a corner I saw a scientist whom I’d interviewed previously or whose research I admired. (Full disclosure: I received a science communication award funded by Schmidt Sciences in 2024.)

It’s a weird time for university AI researchers, who make up most of the AI2050 group. In the past four years, AI research has reoriented around large language models, and its cutting edge has moved from academic institutions to private companies. Universities simply can’t afford the GPUs required to train and run frontier models, and even if they could, Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t letting anyone else see the inner details of Claude or ChatGPT.

In a conversation over lunch, Nika Haghtalab, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley, said that being an AI academic these days was like being a biologist in a world in which private companies had exclusive control over the gene-editing tool CRISPR. Experts outside the frontier labs can study how ChatGPT and Claude behave, but they can’t do any detailed research on the design and training of those tools, nor can they steer that design or training themselves.

The AI2050 program does offer fellows some funding that they can use to buy GPUs, which some researchers I spoke with said was a major benefit of participating in the program. But money remains a pressing concern, especially given the reduction of federal scientific funding in the United States. Even for researchers who don’t run local models themselves, the cost of repeatedly querying OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s, and Google’s models in order to study them rigorously can be prohibitive.

Rather than focusing on advancing capabilities, many fellows aim their attention at questions that are unlikely to be addressed by Anthropic or OpenAI. “I try not to work on problems that I think are gonna be solved by a tech company,” says Anjalie Field, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins. Companies need to make money, and research questions that have little promise of profit might not be worth investing in—especially if their answers might make the companies look bad. Recently, for example, Field conducted a study in which she found that language models give less sophisticated responses to prompts that are phrased in ways more commonly used by women than by men. It’s difficult to imagine that kind of research coming out of Anthropic or OpenAI.

There’s also a huge group of AI academics who don’t work with LLMs at all. Many of them are scientists who build specialized AI models that can analyze data, make useful predictions, or even simulate entire physical systems. Those researchers aren’t necessarily competing with the frontier labs—Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold team, which built a Nobel Prize–winning model that predicts the structures of proteins, was disbanded last month. But they face plenty of their own challenges. At the convening, several voiced concerns about how the widespread ignorance of non-LLM AI was affecting their work. Researchers who build specialized AI tools to help address climate change, for example, sometimes struggle to advocate for their work when so many people believe that “AI” means “energy-guzzling LLMs.”

All these challenges are changing the landscape of academia: Several prominent academics have recently taken leave from their universities to join frontier labs, and many AI2050 fellows hold industry positions alongside their academic jobs. And in the past six months, yet another threat has emerged. OpenAI’s models have solved a number of real research problems in mathematics, and some experts are worried that humans might not have a future in pure math. One fellow I spoke with said that she was concerned about the mental health of her mathematician peers.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. For one thing, empirical science may prove much more difficult to automate than mathematics, because collecting data is an intrinsically slow process. And some researchers see AI mathematicians and scientists as a boon rather than a threat—including Tim Dettmers, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon who works to make AI models faster and cheaper to run. AI scientists won’t replace humans, Dettmers says. On the contrary, they could make human scientists far more efficient, so that he and his peers have the chance to pursue all the wild and inspired ideas they might otherwise never have gotten around to.

And scientists are a resilient sort. The very resource constraints that prevent them from training frontier models also push them to discover new ways to make models smaller and more efficient, or to explore completely new architectures. If the next big AI breakthrough comes not from a major company but from a scrappy academic lab, I won’t be shocked.