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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

#101

Post by sigmoid10 »

notRobot wrote: post #94
cortesoft wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

And crucially, you should want to others to build upon it, like you build upon so many that came before you.

If your perception of a moat is worth more than the GDP of most countries, publishing anything must seem like a bad idea. Much less helping others build upon your work.

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

#102

Post by paytonjjones »

cortesoft wrote: post #89
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?

That's not really a common attitude in academia, unfortunately.

The most common attitude is something closer to "I want to be well known and respected by smart and influential people". In short, prestige.

People using your work is a side effect of success, but simultaneously threatens your ownership of your "brand". If they significantly improve upon the thing you did, your work could be made irrelevant, your prestige ruined.

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

#103

Post by MichaelZuo »

paytonjjones wrote: post #102
cortesoft wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

That's not really a common attitude in academia, unfortunately. The most common attitude is something closer to "I want to be well known and respected by smart and influential people". In short, prestige. People using your work is a side effect of success, but simultaneously threatens your ownership of your "brand". If they significantly improve upon the thing you did, your work could be made irrelevant, your prestig…

Huh? Wouldn’t their prestige be improved if some other group spent a lot of effort improving on it?

That would clearly demonstrate it had real substance beyond hot air or puffery.

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

#104

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

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.

Also 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?

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

#106

Post by lenerdenator »

cortesoft wrote: post #89
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?

For researchers, yes.

For startups, no, because the point of that is to make money.

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

#107

Post by oefrha »

egonschiele wrote: post #15

As 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.

From 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 so someone more determined at getting a better answer can poke at it.

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

#108

Post by fluoridation »

xienze wrote: post #100
cortesoft wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There seems to be this mentality among a large number of people who publish open data/research/software that everything is fine as long as no one else makes money using it. The second that happens, they're furious and act as though someone unfairly profited off of their "unpaid labor" (read: that thing they did purely for the love of the game). I think it has to be some sort of feeling of resentment and/or stupidity…

It's not that difficult. You invest effort into research in the hope it'll give you a competitive edge. If someone else can come along and reproduce your results practically at a much lesser cost, then you lose that competitive edge. You're back at square one, except you've lost the cost of the research.

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

#109

Post by fooker »

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…

Publishing CS papers at the top venues requires using in-group language and formalism that is pretty much inaccessible to someone who has not done a PhD in that specific narrow field.

LLMs are pretty good at this, hilariously. This means a genuinely good paper by an outsider has significantly less chance of getting good reviews than AI slop.

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

#110

Post by threethirtytwo »

ninjahawk1 wrote: post #90

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 si…

Recursive self improvement is the beginning of the end.
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