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…
There is almost no benefit in publishing frontier research as a startup. People can try to argue it but it is not defensible. Publishing that kind of thing is a flex that companies risking nothing can do. Cool for Google. Problematic if you are a startup.
AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
191–200 of 341 posts
Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share a link to the preprint?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.02.471005v2....
Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
#193Earlier 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…
Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Good point, another example would be for when I was training my own small LM a while back, the target was about 170M parameters and was trained on 2B tokens worth of movie subtitles. The run stalled mid-step around 80M parameters, Orb notified me that it stalled, asked if I wanted to resume at the last checkpoint and kill the stalled version. I simply press “yes” and continue doing whatever I was doing. For non-techn…
Hmm, so your harness is processing my activity and personal data, uploading all that to AI vendors? That sounds like a privacy and security nightmare, if I understand correctly
Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone has ever tried having a model fully autonomously train a model that is better than it.
Everyone including myself has attempted this relentlessly, it just doesn't work out beyond some arbitrary improvement in specific tested categories instead of broader capability increase.
Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
good.
Do you want companies to have incentives to pay researchers even if NDAs and non competes are basically unenforceable? Do you want any communication of knowledge from corporations? Should companies not be allowed to benefit from sometimes huge investments in research?
I thought "recursive self improvement" would bring an effective abundance for everybody, any minute now, Musk said so himself. Seems the researchers in the field are lying to us about it while they clutch their pearls and dream about other people's money as if the future is a dog-eats-dog world of death-inducing scarcity.
They shouldn't be lying like that, or at least, their lying shouldn't be so obvious.
Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
#197I'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…
There is almost no benefit in publishing frontier research as a startup. People can try to argue it but it is not defensible. Publishing that kind of thing is a flex that companies risking nothing can do. Cool for Google. Problematic if you are a startup.
Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Eh. Peer review isn't central to science. The point of peer review is: you have a claim someone makes; if it's been peer-reviewed, you can build further research on it without having verify the claim yourself. If you're building technology directly, any result you use you're going to verify inherently, because it either works as advertised or your tech doesn't work. The external verification doesn't add that much in…
If you are spending time, money, and risk based on a claim, verification still helps to cull info that is deceptive or done with methods so shoddy it might as well be lying.
Sure, you can verify through your failures, but that isnt great. You company goes belly up and you can confidently say the blog was bullshit.
Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
>terminate the agreement Meaning what? Claw back the ideas from people's minds? You can terminate the agreement in the sense that you revoke access to the paper, but presumably the person you find in breach has already used the research for something that you find them in breach for. You're kind of closing the gate after the horse has bolted. >sue for damages I honestly have no idea what damages you could claim from…
> Meaning what? Claw back the ideas ... If something is so obviously wrong then perhaps take a minute to consider that your interpretation isn't what the other party intended? If I pay you not to do something and then you breach the contract I can terminate the agreement and seek damages. Ditto if I pay you to repeatedly do something and then at some point you fail to do it. So if I pay you a recurring fee to publish…
Uh-huh... This doesn't answer my question of what terminating the agreement of access to the paper does, besides what I've already said. You've licensed to me access to a paper under certain conditions. I've breached the conditions, therefore you terminate the agreement, therefore you revoke access. Am I missing anything?
>FOSS software licenses obviously substitute "right to use the code" for "payment".
Hence my question. The hypothetical license/contract under discussion is about access to research results, not about a monetary transaction.
>This is incredibly contrived.
Well, the idea of viral abstract ideas is stupid, so it forces me to give contrived examples.
>I'm going to assume that all the lawyers who have sure left me with the impression that it would be a bad idea to violate it know what they're talking about.
What point do you think you're making? Something can be ambiguously (but not certainly) risky and a bad idea to do. I have two coins, one with two tails and the other a fair one, and I offer you to gamble everything you own on one of these coins of your choosing, or walk away. I assume you wouldn't pick the unfair one. Therefore if you would rather walk away than gamble everything you own on the normal coin, the toss actually has a 100% chance of you losing?
Re: AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
#200The 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…
so unless those companies (openai, anthropic) gave the researchers some fortune big enough to make them give up their research careers, they will keep publish research papers. aka it is not the good will of those companies.