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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

#61

Post by s1artibartfast »

sndgndgndgndy wrote: post #56
shimman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but it is good that people actually adhere to that method if inquiry.

They are not perfect, but institutions like peer review or universities do provide a framework and incentives for quality.

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

#62

Post by janalsncm »

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…

Some companies are sharing their research. Mostly not the American ones

Example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24653

Exceptions to some like Deepmind, Nvidia, and Thinking Machines

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

#63

Post by antonvs »

HDBaseT wrote: post #60
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.

OpenAI and Anthropic are identified in the article and study as top publishers of AI research papers.

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

#64

Post by antonvs »

aeternum wrote: post #31

The age of the dark forest is upon us

Commercial 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.)

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

#65

Post by larodi »

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…

Google published a lot. I still wonder this original transformer paper, and the attention, etc. Why would they allow it to let go in the open? Perhaps because was intended for translation first before someone decided to loop it over itself? Or was so obscure to fellow researchers what do they actually publish?

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

#66

Post by noosphr »

I'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.

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

#67

Post by blackqueeriroh »

fultonn wrote: post #51
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…

Let me help rewrite your first paragraph:

* A disproportionate amount of value in the computing industry was created by g̶e̶n̶i̶u̶s̶e̶s̶ decently smart people who worked together to do things that seemed impossible 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.*

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

#68

Post by golem14 »

usef- wrote: post #59
jazzyjackson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rare books seldom are under copyright and that’s not a concern then.

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

#69

Post by xyzzy123 »

jsphweid wrote: post #11
cute_boi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget publishing, companies like misanthropic are buying rare books and destroying it. [1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

When they do this, are they buying a single copy of say Book A and destroying a single Book A copy? Or are they buying every copy they can find of Book A and destroying all of them?

Hi, shredding the book is to reduce potential legal liability of format shifting - if you shred the book after scanning, the theory is you are not increasing the number of copies. This has come up as a factor in legal rulings. The legality of format shifting is still murky though, and the legality of training on the work are a separate question.

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

#70

Post by dumpsterdiver »

TimCTRL wrote: post #2

Yet none of them would have been here if Google hadn't published "Attention is all you need", the irony.

The irony may only just be unfolding - check out this paper from 2015:

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?

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