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

141–150 of 341 posts

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

#141

Post by lenerdenator »

perpetuallunch wrote: post #124
geysersam wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why is op trying to publish?

Arguably, the point of a startup isn’t to make money, it’s to attract attention and then investors. Once the business is making money it’s not really a startup any more, it’s a going concern. OP is an undergrad student. Attracting attention is what will make them stand out. And sharing research at this stage will probably expose them to research others don’t want to publish but do want to share with other researchers…

> Arguably, the point of a startup isn’t to make money, it’s to attract attention and then investors.

Investors with money.

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

#142

Post by skeptic_ai »

ninjahawk1 wrote: post #134
colingauvin wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what you mean by proactive? Could you share a bit more?

Happily, current AI is interacted with in a reactive loop. I open the Claude app, CLI, whatever, say my prompt, get an output. I personally wanted an AI that was able to reach out to me about my life before I had to reach out to it. An example, a friend just emailed me asking to meet for at 1pm but I have class at 1:30, so a proactive AI would see that conflict and send me a notification about it, asking if the propo…

What’s so innovative to send an auto message every x time or based on events: “wake up and check if you got anything to do”.

OR

“Event x happened at y time”

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

#143

Post by skeptic_ai »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #110
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.

ChatGPT 5.6 Sol ultra still can get basic things written cleanly. I still need to tweak it quite a few times to get it right. Super useful but if you vibe code you’re in a huge mess after 1 billion tokens.

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

#144

Post by sheeshkebab »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #139
r3trohack3r wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want people to copy it, but want a 20 year temporary monopoly, you can publish an open source step-by-step guide for someone to recreate what you’re doing with the patent office.

The patents are effectively unenforcible. People stopped patenting frontier computer science research 20 years ago. That is the current reality.

good.

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

#145

Post by pfisherman »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #115
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…

That's also a reason the big labs stopped. Publishing is most valuable to people who have no other way to get the attention of smart strangers. Once you can hire nearly anyone and everyone already returns your calls, the main remaining effect of publishing is to tell your competitors which things worked. This is what happens to every field as it turns from a science into an industry. Chemists published freely until d…

There are other reasons. One is for career development of your researchers. Another is to be good citizens, in good standing, in the community of scientific researchers. Another is to flex on people and buy class and respectability - to comport oneself as the “old money” does.

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

#146

Post by jandrewrogers »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #144
jandrewrogers wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patents are effectively unenforcible. People stopped patenting frontier computer science research 20 years ago. That is the current reality.

good.

The downside is frontier computer science in several domains is decades beyond the state-of-the-art from academic literature. This is the situation that patents were designed to disincentivize.

There is not an obvious path to making this research public again. That's the reality. For open source to be competitive it needs to be approximately as efficient as the best systems we design.

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

#147

Post by thewanderer1983 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #115
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…

That's also a reason the big labs stopped. Publishing is most valuable to people who have no other way to get the attention of smart strangers. Once you can hire nearly anyone and everyone already returns your calls, the main remaining effect of publishing is to tell your competitors which things worked. This is what happens to every field as it turns from a science into an industry. Chemists published freely until d…

This academic publish and industry doesn't is an incorrect view. Academics also hold off from publishing groundbreaking science in order to protect their research edge. You shouldn't see this as industry bad as driven by profits and academia is free from career incentives and money.

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

#148

Post by 1718627440 »

olalonde wrote: post #122
fluoridation wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hence why most companies don't publish research and most software is proprietary. Publishing and open source only make sense in certain situations.

Open source doesn't mean, it's available to the general public.

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

#150

Post by monk_grilla »

ninjahawk1 wrote: post #134
colingauvin wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what you mean by proactive? Could you share a bit more?

Happily, current AI is interacted with in a reactive loop. I open the Claude app, CLI, whatever, say my prompt, get an output. I personally wanted an AI that was able to reach out to me about my life before I had to reach out to it. An example, a friend just emailed me asking to meet for at 1pm but I have class at 1:30, so a proactive AI would see that conflict and send me a notification about it, asking if the propo…

> An example, a friend just emailed me asking to meet for at 1pm but I have class at 1:30, so a proactive AI would see that conflict and send me a notification about it, asking if the proposed email it drafted works, then I press send.

I don't mean to downplay your work, but I think you should come up with a better example use case. Automating away interactions with friends is pretty much the last thing I want AI to do.

Post reply on HN