Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't doing it on their own. Most of these kids are working with established researchers who give them the shape of the project, as well as the tools and the expertise to accomplish it. More recently the US scientific funding bodies have had summer programs for kids who wouldn't otherwise get that kind of access, but it's still the exception. It takes more than a summer to do this kind of work. Edit: quick sear…
>these kinds of science fairs are fundamentally about access. Completely agree there, which kind of brings me to a related thought: One thing I do wonder is, if you look at a few hundred years ago a lot of the inventors in math, physics, engineering, were a tiny group of people with access to resources and education. You're always reading the same names. It seems if we as a society could decide that science is more i…
That's how ML research is - all you need is sufficient compute and some torrented training data. It gives rise to a new problem of drowning in the literature. I think we simply don't have the tooling and institutions to integrate simultaneous scientific advancements from any significant portion of the population.