Oh I’m sure we could commiserate about that. I think we work in vaguely the same area.
Unfortunately, getting money from industry isn’t much easier in my opinion.
We have some software projects we want to spin out into a small business or non-profit (because federal funding…), but industry is absolutely cold right now. Had a few very promising partners lined up, but it all evaporated last spring. Between tariffs, AI spending, and now oil, everyone is reluctant to spend.
The chaos is affecting pretty much all areas of science, not just the controversial ones. I work in non-controversial, pretty run-of-the-mill chemistry research and the attacks on the NSF have certainly impacted our funding situation. Very long delays in proposal review, complete pivoting to AI, etc. I have co-workers panicking over the green card changes. And the overall morale is pretty grim everywhere.
Edit: don’t forget how he’s forcing NSF headquarters to move. All the NSF, not just the “bad” research.
Almost everyone has entertained the idea of leaving the US for more stability, which is required for research.
> he said "you may have the right of way, but you'll still be dead if one hits you"
Here lies the body
Of William Jay,
Who died maintaining
His right of way.
He was in the right
As he sped along,
But he’s just as dead
As if he’d been wrong.
Edgar A. Guest, possibly. Some variations and discussion here:
I thought the same thing. Just a few years ago, everyone here was proclaiming Poetry was great, the python ecosystem was finally tamed, pip/conda/setuptools was dead, and every project and developer needs to adopt it.
Now it’s just a has-been. The churn in python is incredible.
Over the long term, yes. However, universities like Buffalo might have some peculiarities. They are overall run by the state government, and professors/students/staff are state employees. In addition, the money that pays their salary often comes from the federal government (NSF, DOE, NIH) which comes with their own restrictions and regulations beyond typical accounting practices.
So things like reimbursements are handled by a university trying to implement a state government's interpretation of both granting agencies desires and federal and state laws/regulations.
My university seems to be going crazy with rules lately. My hypothesis is that the state, and by extension the university, wants to button down everything so as not draw attention of the federal government (given who is in charge). It's taking already stressed professors (funding cuts, etc) and piling on more stress.
I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.
Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.
> a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground.
There’s probably a lot that match, but sounds like Colgan Air 3407 in 2009 (the last major commercial airline crash in the US before the mid-air collision earlier this year in DC)
OpenAI "spent" more on sales/marketing and equity compensation than that:
"Other significant costs included $2 billion spent on sales and marketing, nearly doubling what OpenAI spent on sales and marketing in all of 2024. Though not a cash expense, OpenAI also spent nearly $2.5 billion on stock-based equity compensation in the first six months of 2025"
I’ve always found the pioneer, settler, town planner model to be a great way of thinking about this. Successful, long-term projects or organizations eventually can use all 3 types.
Maybe vibe coding replaces some pioneering work, but that still leaves a lot for settlers to do.
The annual budget of the entire NSF is $8.28B. The NIH is $42B
Google's net profit was $40B in 2020. Apple's was $94.6B in 2021. (all according to wikipedia).
Edit: The above is net income, so AFTER paying all the exorbitant salaries.
Apple alone makes enough money that it could fund pretty much all current publicly-funded science happening in the US at the current rate. That is a ridiculous amount of money, and publicly-funded science just cannot compete at that level.
(Currently on publicly-funded grants. Underpaid relative to what I could make elsewhere, but happy to be contributing to the greater good rather than helping some advertising company).
The tension of feeling the actual need to use AI, but internalizing blame and guilt, is something I've noticed in my students and colleagues as well.