Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 341 posts

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

#81

Post by willy_k »

larodi wrote: post #65
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?

It took 6 years to get from Attention Is All You Need to a consumer product. Up until ChatGPT’s release, LLMs were obscure and really were just fancier autocomplete. Deepmind was largely a speculative research division until Google decided to play catch up, and even that took a bit of time as they figured out how to proceed in a way that wouldn’t cannabalize search. So in short they didn’t realize the potential. Thats my somewhat naive take.

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

#82

Post by londons_explore »

eikenberry wrote: post #74
noosphr wrote: post #66

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…

Why 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.

For the individual employees, having your name on a peer reviewed paper in a prestigious journal makes you far more employable elsewhere.

Moreso if your current employer is a stealth AI startup which hasn't yet produced much notable.

It also can encourage employees to work for fewer wages... 'If you do great work you can publish and then get a $$$$$$ job offer at OpenAI, or you can stay here and get equity in a fast growing startup. If however your work doesn't do well, you walk away from a bankrupt startup with worthless shares and minimum wage'

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

#83

Post by eikenberry »

noosphr wrote: post #80
eikenberry wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why 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.

The article is complaining that research isn't peer reviewed and research is turning into blogs. I'm explaining why that's the best outcome possible and why in a field as hot as large dl models you won't even get that.

I thought parent post was saying that they didn't publish them at all after they had so much trouble with the journals. If they did publish the papers themselves then I don't see the problem. The article itself read to me as your standard journal rent seeking and I wasn't really responding to it.

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

#84

Post by beloch »

"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.

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

#85

Post by usef- »

golem14 wrote: post #68
usef- wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that easy to tell for each book, though?

I usually hear that it's extremely hard to track down the copyright owners for many older things. That's the reason the film/video industry often gives for not digitising the backlog online, and I would expect their volume to be much easier to handle than the book industry.

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

#86

Post by yiyingzhang »

Many 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).

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

#87

Post by Forgeties79 »

eikenberry wrote: post #74
noosphr wrote: post #66

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…

Why 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.

Same reason movies released on YouTube aren’t treated with the same respect as those released in theaters.

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

#88

Post by kloop »

tfrancisl wrote: post #48
dominotw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

$160 billion valuation and market capture among some top (non-AI, traditional enterprise) companies, I think.

Yeah, but that capture is usually just hosted spark usage.

The AI usage has mostly been getting it to explain error messages

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

#89

Post by cortesoft »

noosphr wrote: post #66

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…

> That and avoiding openAI and Anthropic copying our results and leaving us with nothing to show for six months of work.

Isn't the POINT of publishing research because you want others to copy it?

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

#90

Post by ninjahawk1 »

I 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.

Post reply on HN