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AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
- TimCTRL 3mo agoYet none of them would have been here if Google hadn't published "Attention is all you need", the irony.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- arjie 3mo agoThe authors of that paper are all at AI companies not named Google.
- mountainriver 3mo agoOh that built on a bunch of ideas that weren’t far off. It was a great discovery but like many it’s standing in tall shoulders
- dumpsterdiver 3mo agoThe irony may only just be unfolding - check out this paper from 2015: https://research.google/pubs/distilling-the-knowledge-in-a-neural-network/ https://research.google/pubs/distilling-the-knowledge-in-a-n... # LLM generated summary of the implied irony Google may consider the standalone frontier-model arms race economically irrational, while still considering frontier-model capability strategically indispensable. Its longer game is probably not to avoid building the biggest models, but to build only enough of them to serve as capability factories—then turn that intelligence into a much larger population of cheap, purpose-built models. (Human again) If Google knew what they were on to, why wouldn’t they make it their secret weapon from the start? I suspect it’s because they predicted there would be an arms race, and knew how to profit from it. They had a distillation paper published before “Attention is all you need”. In hindsight, is it ironic at all? Or is it obvious?
- geysersam 3mo agoI think the answer is much simpler: They didn't recognize the potential of that specific architecture. I don't think anyone could have. They valued the perk to employees being able to publish research, and the prestige that followed, and googles ability to attract talent, more than they did the content of those papers.
- pixl97 3mo agoEven Google wouldn't be here. It was kind of like radiation science before WWII, it would be freely published because it wasn't potentially world changing yet. After it became a government interest, even people doing things unrelated to weapons would be much more apt to hold their work close.
- anilraut30 3mo agoyes. and MapReduce, Borg research earlier inspiring creation of similar a decade long transforming forces - Hadoop and Docker/Kubernetes. Geoffrey Hinton once said after ChatGPT, Google had all secret sauces. may be going all-in means risking own well established business model (Google) but cat was out shifting attention elsewhere, eventually Google coughing up owing vertical stack (Chips, Models, Cloud, Consumer Market) and Saga continues...
- KoolKat23 3mo agoPerhaps I'm imagining it but the entire industry was build on published research, this "AI wave" is at odds with that and seems to be driven by greed (although they'll claim some arms race or something to help themselves sleep at night). There should be a new ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) policy being pushed recognizing the important role this plays. Although ESG and all norms have been set aside in this grim new world it seems.
- cute_boi 3mo agoForget publishing, companies like misanthropic are buying rare books and destroying it. [1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
- drivebyhooting 3mo agoWhat do you mean?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- KolmogorovComp 3mo agoTo scan them, they usually have to resort breaking them into individual pages.
- taude 3mo agothey're refering to this: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-de...
- wonnage 3mo agohttps://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli... The scanning process destroys the book.
- sublinear 3mo ago> “If we were racing forward on cancer-curing AI, I would be like, ’Fantastic, full steam ahead,’” she says. “But that’s not what we’re racing toward, right?” We're not racing towards anything. We've been going in circles for years.
- warkdarrior 3mo ago> We're not racing towards anything. We've been going in circles for years. We reached the NASCAR-racing equivalent of scientific research.
- datakan 3mo agoFeels more like 3 steps forward and 2 steps back.
- semiinfinitely 3mo agogate keepers of antiquated practice decry people realizing they they dont need to get past the gate
- KoolKat23 3mo agoNo man is an island.
- egonschiele 3mo agoAs far as I can tell, the paper never actually mentions the companies who aren't publishing papers. Open AI, Anthropic, and hugging face are all specifically mentioned as companies that do publish papers. Just FYI for anyone else who reads "AI's top startups" and immediately assumes OpenAI and Anthropic.
- oefrha 3mo agoFrom a quick skim, the paper does a really bad job at answering the question in everyone’s mind when they see the title. Like, OpenAI is at the top in terms of citations, but as we all know old influential papers tend to accumulate more citations, and there was a period when OpenAI was, you know, more open… Are they still contributing now, post Altman pivot? No idea from the paper (maybe I missed it). In fact papers after 2025 are explicitly excluded, and we’re probably more interested in access to the cutting edge. Anyway, there’s a repo link https://github.com/q5loisel/unicorn-AI-startup-publications https://github.com/q5loisel/unicorn-AI-startup-publications so someone more determined at getting a better answer can poke at it.
- odyssey7 3mo agoOnce something goes commercial, academics have to consider what progress would be research-worthy, rather than a half-baked prototype for a product or feature. Companies can’t be expected to publish their confidential and proprietary information about their feature development, and academics should consider projects that would have higher impact. If you’re taking up a seat in a PhD program tinkering with would-be feature ideas for an existing major tech company, you should really just get hired by that tech company, where the resources are abundant and the degree is not required.
- ndriscoll 3mo ago> Companies can’t be expected to publish their confidential and proprietary information about their feature development, Of course they can. Simply eliminate trade secret protections and NDAs, which have literally zero purpose for society and in fact undermine patents' incentive to publish. Give a one year grace period to apply for a patent. Patent protection should be designed to be only as long as needed to try to maximize the development/spread of technology, e.g. maybe 2-3 years for rapidly developing areas like ML. We should all be expected to contribute whatever knowledge we find to the commons. It makes us all richer.
- odyssey7 3mo agoFor as long as the information is confidential and proprietary, we live in a world where my advice applies. Additionally, the reason ML is rapidly developing and that companies are spending billions to do so is that they are in competition with one another. If trade secrets were impossible, they would have no economic motive. Any advantage gained, at a cost of millions or billions, would not improve their competitive stance in the market at all, since their competitors would also immediately have the same product. No company can get away with, at least not for very long, throwing billions at vanity projects that lack the potential to improve shareholder value. If the process of invention were free, the point about freely / mandatorily contributing to the commons might stand, but when the process requires the actors to take on massive financial risks, you need the economic incentives to be present. Academia is a unique place where the incentive is to share ideas—though not immediately and freely, but under carefully controlled conditions that support the career of the researcher. Once the area of study goes commercial, the game changes.
- raincole 3mo agoDo startups in other fields constantly publish their research?
- xtracto 3mo agoThat was my first thought. In my experience, particularly with trading firms (the ones doing real science based prediction trading, not TA bullshit) do not publish ANYTHING at all, and haven't for 40+ years. Think Renaissance Technologies or similar.
- 11101010010001 3mo agopublications would likely lead to regulation, if the SEC was properly resourced.
- DonsDiscountGas 3mo agoIn biotech sometimes. It's a form of advertising.
- xyst 3mo agoThat’s because most of its slop, and not reproducible
- Revanche1367 3mo agoLive by the non-determinism, die by the non-determinism.
- kekku 3mo ago[flagged]
- ltbarcly3 3mo agoAll startups barely publish their research, because doing that would be incredibly stupid for the most part, because they want to sell the stuff they invent not give it away for free.
- paxys 3mo agoI’m not sure why this is so surprising? AI company does not automatically mean research company. The vast majority of new startups popping up over the last few years have commercial motivations, and use models built by someone else. Why are you expecting them to publish scientific papers? 50% of startups contributing to public research is actually a crazy good outcome. That’s far more than I had expected.
- HDBaseT 3mo agoWhen the second biggest player is named 'OpenAI', I would expect some papers to be published.
- antonvs 3mo agoOpenAI and Anthropic are identified in the article and study as top publishers of AI research papers.
- _0ffh 3mo agoI don't see that, where do you read that? Also, what kind of papers do they publish at all? When I look at the recently (say, last 1-2 years) published practical improvements in the LM space, they're not even close to what the Chinese are publishing.
- saidnooneever 3mo agothat name implies nothing. it did when it started and promptly pivoted away from that meaning once money got involved...
- DonsDiscountGas 3mo agoAlso the reason we fund science publicly is because we can't count on the incentives from the free market. I mean why would they share information with competitors?
- saidnooneever 3mo agoin most fields its normal for research to become IP rather than papers to keep competitive edge. so this seems really normal stuff tbh... also, first people complain that only AI companies publish on AI, and now they complain the same companies stop those same publications :'). it is never good.
- amazingamazing 3mo agoTrade secrets are back, baby! More to the point, without determining how much work is “worthy” of a paper it is unclear how much this matters. Most AI companies are either a product and marketing layer over a model or not meaningfully moving any dimension to be worthy of a paper. Also, formal papers and blogs and “cards” are all being intertwined.
- EGreg 3mo agoFunny, as ONE PERSON with Claude, I've been on a tear when it comes to publishing my own research: https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Magarshak%2C+G https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Magarshak%... So I know that smart people in those companies can definitely publish. In fact, a whole team should probably be publishing like no tomorrow!
- randomImmigrant 3mo agoWhat the blogificafion of AI research has done is allowed all kinds of claims and terminology related to AI to be introduced and taken up in a manner replicating social media dynamics. And that is simply not healthy. We’re fast reaching a place where any claim can be backed up with a set of numbers from a number of experiments run in some gamified environment or the other, with little concern for if it all adds up to anything. It’s a vicious loop, because this same junk then goes in to train the next models which help spit out the next set of models AND blogs/papers. The net effect is not dissimilar to setting termites loose in a library.
- gowld 3mo agoHow is that different from traditional research publication? It's faster?
- shimman 3mo agoNo traditional research is mostly done by post-docs and have a phd level of education rather than a tech bro that passed leetcode. That seems like a good bar to have; not too mention the whole peer review thing, hard to really understand anything if you purposely withhold it and tell people to kick rocks.
- greazy 3mo agoPlenty of research is performed by non PhDs. The main difference is reproducibility and peer review process.
- Heliosmaster 3mo agooutside physics/math a lot of published research isn't reproducible at all. There's been several studies that show this.
- DonHopkins 3mo ago> There's been several studies that show this. Were they peer reviewed and reproducable? And what's the point of claiming there are peer reviewed reproducable studies that show this, if you don't bother citing those studies for your peers to review?
- aeternum 3mo agoThe age of the dark forest is upon us
- antonvs 3mo agoCommercial competition has always had a dark forest character - disclosing trade secrets can lead to loss of competitive edge and in the worst case, like the dark forest, death of the company. (Not saying that's how it should be, but that's how it has been.)
- Aurornis 3mo agoThe article is vague about the companies in the paper, for some reason. In the paper, OpenAI is at the top of the chart for cumulative citations. MEGVII, Hugging Face, Waymo, Momenta, Preferred Netowkrs, Anthropic, Owkin, and Databricks, and Aibee follow (in that order). Yes, that is citations, not publications, but they explain that they're trying to use that as a proxy for significance, albeit an imperfect one. Companies like Google aren't included because they aren't unicorn startups.
- dominotw 3mo agodatabricks is a top ai startup?. i thought they did spark hosting or something. what makes them a top ai startup
- tfrancisl 3mo ago$160 billion valuation and market capture among some top (non-AI, traditional enterprise) companies, I think.
- kloop 3mo agoYeah, but that capture is usually just hosted spark usage. The AI usage has mostly been getting it to explain error messages
- milkshakes 3mo agothey also have a pretty handy button right next to the error to ftfy
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- muragekibicho 3mo agoThey just raised their series Z or something lol.
- larodi 3mo ago
- annoyingnoob 3mo agoStartups exist to profit, not necessarily publish.
- TrackerFF 3mo agoI don't expect non-foundational or non-frontier startups to do, or publish much heavy hitting research. "AI" has become such a ubiquitous description, it is probably easier to find non-AI startups.
- deadbabe 3mo agoThere is no reason to publish anything in the AI era until you have reaped as much benefit from it as you are satisfied with. "Building in public" and "Researching in public" now means someone can swoop in with an AI and copy you instantly and become your competition overnight. Keep secrets. Even at work, I have come to realize if I simply horde my accumulated custom AI built tools and productivity boosting tricks for myself, I can make myself more competitive as an employee. I think this is how you get hired now, not by having a good resume, but by making claims of having special processes and personal tooling design that gets massive productivity ROI.
- noosphr 3mo agoI've been at two startups that have done genuine world first fundamental research. The first tried to publish novel results for 3 years in tier 1 journals before finally doing a preprint and telling the tier one publishers to jump in a fire. The second, and ongoing, isn't publishing anything because of my experience with the first. That and avoiding openAI and Anthropic copying our results and leaving us with nothing to show for six months of work. The papers only come with the pitch deck.
- NetOpWibby 3mo agoCan you share a link to the preprint?
- noosphr 3mo agohttps://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.02.471005v2.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.02.471005v2....
- NetOpWibby 3mo agoSweet, thanks! The intro reminds me of Tron: Ares, when Ares was put through endless battle training cycles until he was a solider. Fascinating stuff.
- eikenberry 3mo agoWhy wouldn't they just skip the journals and publish the papers themselves? Sharing the research is the important part unless these are academics who are trying to get tenure, grants or such.
- Forgeties79 3mo agoSame reason movies released on YouTube aren’t treated with the same respect as those released in theaters.
- noosphr 3mo ago
- beloch 3mo ago"But University of Alberta AI ethicist Mohamed Abdalla says the findings reflect the incentives facing commercial AI developers, rather than solely a failure to uphold scientific norms. “It’s not the company’s job to advance science, right?” he says. “The company’s job is to advance money.”" ------------ If everyone holds back their publications, the whole sector moves slower. Yes, it's moving alarmingly fast according to many, but is it moving fast enough that the massive investments in data centres will actually pay off? It's more game theory. Things may go well for one selfish company not publishing in a sea of altruists who publish, but perhaps not if everyone else is selfish too.
- verdverm 3mo ago> is it moving fast enough that the massive investments in data centres will actually pay off? It may be moving so fast that they do not pay off, i.e. they get commoditized too fast. This all depends on Ai demand in the end. If you can keep the GPUs saturated (at a profitable rate), then it really shouldn't matter how much a token costs. If you bought too many GPUs, or paid to much for them in a hype cycle, you may need higher token prices to ROI than the market wants to pay given alternatives.
- yiyingzhang 3mo agoMany AI startups open source part of their work and write blog posts without publishing papers, including the startup I work for. Sometimes, startups just have for more pressing things to do and don't have time to write up scientific papers for publishing. Also, there are simply too many AI papers that make peer-review publishing quite meaningless these days (e.g., AAAI this year got more than 50K submissions).
- ninjahawk1 3mo agoI can’t speak for other startups, but I applied to the most recent YC batch with my idea for making AI proactive instead of reactive, and pre-being selected I’ve published a paper on recursive self-improvement mapped to the Epoch AI data. I contacted a professor from a university in the UK and he responded since he was working on similar work, then asked me if I wanted to meet with him. We talked for about an hour since we had overlapping results and different methods, specifically different assumptions. I say all that to say, as a physics student getting my undergrad, simply doing independent research and speaking to experts about it enabled me to network with someone I otherwise likely wouldn’t know. For young people getting into any business, research is a great way to meet new people.
- threethirtytwo 3mo agoRecursive self improvement is the beginning of the end.
- himata4113 3mo agoit's actually the end of the beginning, there's walls that self-improving models hit that are never overcome even when given vast amounts of time.
- threethirtytwo 3mo agoI don't think anyone has ever tried having a model fully autonomously train a model that is better than it.
- himata4113 3mo agoEveryone including myself has attempted this relentlessly, it just doesn't work out beyond some arbitrary improvement in specific tested categories instead of broader capability increase.
- dgellow 3mo ago
- neves 3mo agoDo they receive public funds?
- verdverm 3mo agoBernie Sanders and Donald Trump have plans that would put lots of public money into the biggest Ai companies (sovereign wealth fund). They are getting a lot of money through government contracts, which is ultimately funded by the public through taxes. How we wish to consider public funding and required sharing of gains is an open debate.
- karp773 3mo ago> Moonshot AI, one of the Chinese startups included in the study, recently unveiled Kimi K3—one of the strongest open models to date—and publicly released its model weights through Hugging Face today. ...today? (emphasis is mine) And the author was so excited that decided to write up a paper and submit it to Science all in one day? Yeah, right. That's all you need to know who is moonshooting behind this paper.
- thinkzilla 3mo agoI'm under the impression that the majority of startups go nowhere, so the fact that they don't have this property is not itself a major statement about the field as a whole.
- holografix 3mo agoFrontier AI research is not only under incredible commercial pressure but it’s also a geopolitical advantage. I don’t think Dario wants to be a monopolist. But history is full of brilliant people who focused on the social good as priority #1 and lost the game early. Once you lose the game and go bankrupt you can’t do anything. Same as politics, if you’re not elected you can’t change anything. Of course there are many lines not worth crossing.
- richforrester 3mo agoGreat. How do we fix this. It's like we know things are destined to go down in a flaming pile, and we're just watching so we can change it AFTER that happens. Soz. Kinda a "dear diary" response, but am frustrated.
- 8bitsrule 3mo agoWho's this'Al' I keep seeing in the headlines?
- jandrewrogers 3mo agoSeveral things can be true simultaneously: The process and standards of peer-reviewed publication are tedious. If the objective is efficient communication of knowledge, this is not the process that maximizes that outcome. This process is about credentials and imprimatur, not communication. Academic publication is largely chasing prestige. The value of prestige accrues more to the individual than the company employing the individual. Incentives for companies reflect this. Many blogified publications are unqualified slop. This sounds like an indictment but a lot of academic peer-reviewed research is also low-quality slop. In many domains, slop is rewarded, devaluing the contributions of people publishing more serious research, which affects incentives. The signal-to-noise ratio has been poor for decades no matter where you get your knowledge. Any good research you publish will be exploited against you in myriad ways. It is effectively impossible to assert any IP rights. Research turns into a pure cost center if you treat it this way. Companies recognize this and have adapted to reflect it. In some computer science domains the state-of-the-art has been buried in trade secrets for decades such that the academic literature is embarrassingly obsolete. Publication costs time and money. Given all of the above, why would you invest productive capacity in public communication of research results? The researchers want to work on interesting problems, the companies want to maximize the leverage from their research. Publishing delivers neither. A lot of fundamental research is done for the purpose of solving a problem, not publishing a paper. Their motivation and personal reward is solving the problem, not publishing it. Once they've solved it, it is no longer interesting and they are on to the next interesting problem. Some research is coupled with national security considerations. If you do frontier research this is always sitting in the background. All of this is a consequence of incentives. A large percentage of all basic research no longer happens in academia. I've greatly enjoyed participating in non-publishing research programs. I also understand why they don't publish. I've done a significant amount of interesting foundational research under my own auspices where it was not worth the effort to publish. I'm not chasing prestige, I had a problem I needed to solve. No one should be surprised by any of this.
- mvkel 3mo ago[dead]
- effnorwood 3mo agoAuthor requests open weights from Sam Altman
- supportm 3mo ago[flagged]
- danavar 3mo agoHmmmm I wonder why, so interesting
- cocacolacowboy 3mo ago[dead]
- danieltanfh95 3mo agoWhy would they waste their time in peer review?
- botacode 3mo agoThere was a good paper documenting this in broader industry, and highlighting how it may account for previous research suggesting good ideas have been getting harder to find. Here's the abstract: > Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that ideas are getting harder to find. We build a new 45-year panel tracking the universe of US firms’ patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. We find that average patents per R&D input are increasing, the elasticity of patents to R&D inputs is flat or rising, and there is no systematic evidence of a secular decline in patenting after controlling for research inputs. We then document a positive, significant, and fairly steady relationship between firms’ growth in ideas (patents) and labor productivity. Average firm growth after controlling for idea growth, however, declines. Together, these results suggest that innovative efforts play a key role in sustaining growth that has not diminished over the last four decades. https://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/uploads/teresaFort/files/2026_03_27_FGLSZ_Ideas.pdf https://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/uploads/teresaFort/files/...
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- dgellow 3mo agoHow is that a moat
- h_mirin 3mo ago[dead]
- hoppp 3mo agoWhy would they? Evil China will steal it... (Sarcasm)
- jeffrwells 3mo agoI think a lot of this “research” is a bit overhyped, when even at Anthropic it’s become “please bro find me publishable research” eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49088205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49088205 On the other hand, I have a custom harness agent running an ecommerce business 100% autonomously at this point, but have very little to benefit from trying to “publish” anything about it - and without a Stanford or YC stamp, I doubt anyone would care much anyway
- kriro 3mo agoI'm pretty sure there are plenty of folks at Google who wish they never published the transformer paper. This is also in line with my subjective experience as someone reading quite a few papers in the field: """The preprint also found that firms based in China consistently published more papers than their counterparts based in the United States."""
- BedVibe_Studios 3mo ago[flagged]
- seydor 3mo agowe are deglobalizing, publishing will become increasingly rare
- Ethan312 3mo agoYourGPT is one of the AI startups turning research into practical products for real businesses.
- alexzhangai 3mo ago[flagged]
- okaleniuk 3mo agoIt's not just AI. The whole business of academic publishing is a mess. Can't imagine anyone outside academia wanting to get there. In theory, it should have been a bridge between people who do interesting things that benefit society. In practice, it's a huge indifference machine powered by the institutions KPIs and benefiting no one but Elseveir.
- mohammedmsgm 3mo ago[flagged]
- oxydite 3mo agoAnd it makes sense. If you publish some state-of-the-art algorithm then you're basically helping your competition, and you don't get anything back from them. So you publish bare minimum in small articles on your website, only to gain people's/investors' interest, and just hope that you didn't share too much. And it'll always be like that, unless the root cause changes - intentives. And the main incentives right now are money and power.
- WithinReason 3mo agoWhat other incentives can you imagine for Homo Sapiens?
- petesergeant 3mo agoGlory and altruism
- WithinReason 3mo agoPeople only care about those because it brings them more resources. People seek glory for power. Altruism is not a stable strategy so will be exploited.
- petesergeant 3mo agoTrivially disproved by self-sacrifice in the persual of both
- WithinReason 3mo agoself-sacrifice often brings resources to your kin, and is also easily exploitable
- oxydite 3mo agoWell... I can image incentives like health/survival/independence in case of war or other cataclysm. But this is pretty drastic, nothing else comes to mind though
- dominik_ddd 3mo agoConsidering most of the research is instantly used by competing labs to "update" the way their AI ingest, processes, enriches, or extracts data, we see no surprise here. It's a jungle out there and no one is following any real ehtical lines on this race to the top. Everyone is trying to consume as much as possible while disclosing as little as possible. Any papers published are probably reviewed 10 times to ensure no "secrets" that could be re-applied are leaked.
- KunYuan 3mo ago[flagged]
- yalogin 3mo agoHow much research is a startup expected to do? Isn’t the point of a startup to accelerate productizing research? Unless they are multi billion dollar “startups” do we even expect any research out of them?
- epolanski 3mo agoThis so much I'm not sure what are we discussing about. That's how private research works, from semi conductors to pharma. Academia has the incentive to publish because it's judged and funded on that metric. Private enterprises do not have the same incentive, they are judged by the money they make, which depends on the products they create, which depends on having a technological edge over the competition in many fields. Without those incentives, there would be no reason to invest and take risks in private research. Thus, I'm not really understanding what is this discussion about, when this is the reality of every field. Of course if you don't publish and don't patent there are also incentives for competitors to produce the same results and products, but that's part of the game. It's really a system that works for everyone and protects and incentivizes investment. AI or pharma or polymers or engines, research requires funding, and funding wants mechanisms of returning money to investors, which obviously clashes with doing the work and publishing the results for free.
- rurban 3mo agoWe are publishing patents though.
- simon9679 3mo ago[flagged]
- WiSaGaN 3mo agoTop startups in China publish a lot?
- mnky9800n 3mo agoWhile this article is a summary of John Ioannidis’ work, I do find it kind of like Science magazine is complaining that they aren’t making enough of that AI revenue so come on submit your papers here. I doubt that was the intended message.
- cmiles8 3mo agoHonestly part of the challenge here is that they’re not really doing anything truly groundbreaking that everyone else doesn’t figure out on their own weeks later. That’s not an environment that fits the traditional “publish” mindset and is a big problem for these big labs as everything slides towards being an undifferentiated commodity. We’ve really not had massive advancements in the last few years that weren’t quickly discovered/copied by everyone at the same time, just bigger models. Everyone has been just playing around with the same mathematical parlor tricks from the original breakthrough. Until that changes I expect we’ll continue to see this arms-race-to-the-bottom as everyone is just battling to make a commodity vs true innovation that gives one startup a legit IP advantage over others.
- htltzp 3mo agoThere is hardly any new research. Models have been getting worse over time and everyone is stuck on the transformer architecture.
- angry_octet 3mo agoOutrageous that Science is platforming Ioannidis without a mention of his axe-grinding dismissal of COVID risks and outright attempts at intimidation of opponents. He's already burnt his reputation to slag.
- mdnahas 3mo agoMy worry is learning and innovation. When companies sold physical devices, other companies could learn from them and improve them. We invented patents to provide economic support for innovation. But, with services, nothing is exposed. Every innovation can be a trade secret. That makes it harder to learn and harder for cross pollination of ideas. It probably won’t be good for employees either. Another company won’t bid for your skills as high, since you will take a longer time to train to work on their system.
- abustamam 3mo agoThats probably by design tbh. Every company is working on the next big thing, employees sign NDAs and non competes, because companies don't want other people to deliver on their "novel" idea first. And of course if employees can't transfer their skills elsewhere, they're stuck there.
- alightsoul 3mo agoIt makes sense when there's at least two posts here on hacker news about model routers which just reimplement Sakana Fugu from its ICLR papers, as a for profit business without any revenue sharing with Sakana nor making them open source. Of course Sakana would want to keep their research private to prevent that from happening. Open router fusion is yet another reimplementation of Sakana Fugu.
- kittikitti 3mo agoAcademia is failing to adapt. It used to be that their journals were the only place to learn about technological breakthroughs. Now, I quickly skim the paper and go straight to the source code or data. A publication might be one of the least effective ways to gain scientific impact, second to which is word of mouth. Also, it's too hard to publish and academics are too hostile. These people are government funded and reject work for things like mentioning Palestine. I've had multiple papers automatically rejected even for pre-publication. Even when I have jumped through all these hoops, it has no more credibility than a blog post to the average person. In fact, most people cannot even read my published work. They look at it for a few seconds, squint, and then say, "Cool." All of this and the vast majority of publications are not even replicable. I've made do with uploading code or instructions on how to replicate work through git and then make a blog post about it. I still create papers but they're for myself. When I complete some dense scientific project, a paper is a great format to onboard me onto it a few months later. I'm most concerned about indexing the work, but I find that online archiving tools are the best bet since journals are behind paywalls and are subject to retractions.