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AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

science.org

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Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#51

Post by fultonn »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #3

Perhaps 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 thi…

> Perhaps I'm imagining it

You are not. A disproportionate amount of value in the computing industry was created by geniuses decently smart people who worked together and who decided to just tell people how to do things instead of trying to capture the value of being the first person to figure out how to do those things.

This observation pre-dates the current wave of AI hype by a half century or so.

> driven by greed

I can only speak for myself.

For me it's exactly the opposite. If I want to explain how something works, I can just... do that. If I want to share an artifact demonstrating how to solve a particular type of problem, I can just... do that. If I want to mentor/teach, I can just... do that.

Doing those things within the confines of Academia Approved Institutions is exhausting and distracting.

To wit, and the actual point of this post: the term "Publishing Research" in this article doesn't mean "post it on a .html page and share the source code". It means engaging in a very specific and peculiar and extremely political modality of communication.

And it really only makes sense to do that specific and peculiar and political thing you're at a stage in your professional/personal development where you need to play that particular prestige game. (Which there's nothing wrong with, but it is a deeply cargo culted version of the actual scientific process.)

Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#52

Post by [deleted] »

dominotw wrote: post #37
Aurornis wrote: post #32

The 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. Com…

databricks is a top ai startup?. i thought they did spark hosting or something. what makes them a top ai startup

[deleted]

Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#53

Post by greazy »

shimman wrote: post #45
gowld wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from traditional research publication? It's faster?

No 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.

Plenty of research is performed by non PhDs.

The main difference is reproducibility and peer review process.

Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#54

Post by ltbarcly3 »

gowld wrote: post #36
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #24

All 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.

The stuff they invent isn't what's in the papers. The progress in AI is in the engineering hurdles.

What you just said is not in any relationship to reality.

Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#55

Post by usef- »

gowld wrote: post #35
arjie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The authors of that paper are all at AI companies not named Google.

They wouldn't be if Google hadn't published "Attention is all you need".

Lab employees do seem to be "knowledge sharing" as they move employers as far as I can tell, so I don't think that's true,

Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#56

Post by sndgndgndgndy »

shimman wrote: post #45
gowld wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from traditional research publication? It's faster?

No 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.

Science is a method of inquiry, not an institution or group of people with titles.

Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#57

Post by randomImmigrant »

gowld wrote: post #30
randomImmigrant wrote: post #28

What 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…

How is that different from traditional research publication? It's faster?

Top line difference is speed. The impact of speed is deeper and gets felt over time.

Traditional research publications are no angels. They gatekeep research, and also allow financial incentives to drive them to publish junk with their stamp on it.

But a flood of papers doesn’t actually mean more knowledge. In bypassing this route entirely, AI has swiftly lost the ability to engage with itself as a field. And the cost of that is only beginning to be felt.

Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#58

Post by janalsncm »

shimman wrote: post #45
gowld wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from traditional research publication? It's faster?

No 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.

Two separate axes here: whether the research is in a blog, and whether it’s peer reviewed.

On the first, I mostly don’t care.

On the second, that’s mostly unavoidable if they want to keep their IP.

Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#59

Post by usef- »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #34
wonnage wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli... The scanning process destroys the book.

Note it doesn't have to, it's just faster to. Internet Archive scans their books one page at a time keeping the book intact and stored in a warehouse.

They do: the judge in the Anthropic case said that destroying them means that the text is being transferred, and so therefore can be fair use.

> "The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other."

(I believe the reasoning is that the author is not being financially disadvantaged by more copies of their book existing).

So the current law prefers them to destroy.

Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

#60

Post by HDBaseT »

paxys wrote: post #25

I’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.

When the second biggest player is named 'OpenAI', I would expect some papers to be published.
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