dailyloe.com – Silicon Valley elites are profiting from an assault on the public science funding that built their industry, according to a report. Foundational technologies like semiconductors and the internet emerged from government-funded military research. Google’s search algorithms originated from National Science Foundation grants at Stanford. Even generative AI developed from decades of Department of Defense research.
Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, left his U.S. academic post to avoid Pentagon contracts. He turned to Canadian government funding for his University of Toronto lab. That lab produced leading AI researchers for OpenAI, Google, and Meta. Silicon Valley has consistently profited from this publicly funded research system.
Despite this reliance, tech elites are at the heart of a Trump administration assault on public science funding. Conservative venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have extensive ties to the president. They have launched an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. Leaked text messages reveal Andreessen’s hostility toward these institutions.
In messages leaked to The Washington Post, Andreessen wrote that universities are at ‘Ground Zero of the counterattack.’ He characterized Stanford and MIT as ‘mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation.’ Andreessen vowed universities would ‘pay the price’ after ‘they declared war on 70% of the country.’ Most troublingly, he called for the National Science Foundation to receive severe funding cuts.
This attack comes as Silicon Valley continues to enrich itself from public research. The industry plunders STEM institutions and offers researchers mere scraps in return. The report highlights a profound hypocrisy among techno-libertarian figures. They benefit from the system while working actively to dismantle it.
The touchscreens and lithium-ion batteries in everyday devices were developed in government-funded university labs. This pattern of private profit from public investment is long-standing. Yet reverence for the funding system appears absent among its biggest beneficiaries. The assault threatens the very research pipeline that created modern technology.[]
Source: The Nation
