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AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

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

#211

Post by make3 »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #196
make3 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Do you want companies to have incentives to pay researchers even if NDAs and non competes are basically unenforceable? 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…

No one in the field itself takes Musk seriously, or sees him as part of it. I think he's a Nazi and an idiot. You're weird if you trust what the leader of DOGE, sig heiler and maker of the cyber truck says about anything scientific.

Recursive self improvement is a blue skies longer term thing. No one technical is saying that it's live right now.

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

#212

Post by DonHopkins »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #133
teleforce wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a very ironic and selfish situation when your business model dependent mostly on model training based on available published data, academic and non-academic.

That's why we should enforce copyleft

Ha ha, I snail mailed RMS a Copyleft (L) sticker in 1984. My handwriting was sloppy so it took him a couple years to figure out what it really meant.

https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.html

  From: rms@prep.ai.mit.edu (Richard M. Stallman)
  Date: 25 June 1986 at 18:45:28 GMT+2
  To: a2deh@ai

  I figured out what a copyleft is.
  It's the sort of thing that I put on GNU software and manuals.
  The left-wing version of the copyright that rightists use
to exploit the masses.

But copyrights are not patents, and the opposite of "patent" is "latent", so we need a Latent Office that protects inventions from the people who claim to have invented them, and issues warnings to patent trolls:

  LATENT (L)
  All rights unreserved.
  This invention may already exist, but hasn’t become obvious yet.

  Latentleft — publish the invention, conceal the monopoly.

  Latent Pending — the idea is out there somewhere.

  Latent Troll — remains dormant until an industry becomes profitable.

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

#213

Post by locknitpicker »

baron3dl wrote: post #127
sillysaurusx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i wish more people would publish the things that didn't work. i'd like everything, but the exploration of searched negative space is so wasteful.

> I wish more people would publish the things that didn't work.

This would be a pointless endeavour. One of the most basic mantras of science is "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". So just because something didn't worked out for you that doesn't mean it doesn't work out for others, or even yourself in the future.

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

#214

Post by jeffrwells »

I think a lot of this “research” is a bit overhyped, when even at Anthropic it’s become “please bro find me publishable research”

eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49088205

On the other hand, I have a custom harness agent running an ecommerce business 100% autonomously at this point, but have very little to benefit from trying to “publish” anything about it - and without a Stanford or YC stamp, I doubt anyone would care much anyway

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

#215

Post by don_esteban »

locknitpicker wrote: post #213
baron3dl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wish more people would publish the things that didn't work. i'd like everything, but the exploration of searched negative space is so wasteful.

> I wish more people would publish the things that didn't work. This would be a pointless endeavour. One of the most basic mantras of science is "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". So just because something didn't worked out for you that doesn't mean it doesn't work out for others, or even yourself in the future.

You are talking about a different thing, i.e. you have slipped in a level of abstraction that was not there before:

In 'searching a path from A to B in a maze' language:

The original statement was: (1) The branch to the left from A is a dead end. Your interpretation: (2) There is no path from A to B.

(1) is still very useful (reducing the wasted effort) for those trying to find a path from A to B. The OP's point is that in the current environment only positive results are rewarded (I found the path from A to B!), not the negative ones like (1).

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

#216

Post by fluoridation »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #206
fluoridation wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So if I pay you a recurring fee to publish all your research on a given topic and then you fail to make good on that I can seek damages, right? Now what if I paid you a lump sum up front? Now what if I licensed a patent to you in place of that lump sum? What if instead of a patent it was the right to make use of a piece of software? Uh-huh... This doesn't answer my question of what terminating the agreement of acces…

> I've breached the conditions, therefore you terminate the agreement, therefore you revoke access. Am I missing anything? You're missing the part where I seek punitive and actual damages under the terms of the contract. No different than violating an NDA - I paid you a lump sum up front, after a while you breached the contract, the agreement is null and void, what's the consequence? > Well, the idea of viral abstrac…

>I seek punitive and actual damages under the terms of the contract.

Right, so you're agreeing with my original interpretation of "termination".

>You can terminate the agreement in the sense that you revoke access to the paper

The termination and the lawsuit for damages are separate events. Why did you accuse me of being purposefully dense if you're agreeing with me?

>But in this analogy it is you baselessly making that claim.

We're both making baseless claims. I said A, and then you said ¬A, and neither one has backed anything up. I don't even necessarily believe you talked to any lawyers, I just granted it for the sake of argument because the statement you made was so weak that I didn't need to cast doubt on it.

Also, in case you missed it, the fair coin in the analogy represents the case where the GPL might not be fully valid, not the other way around. If the coin is unfair then the GPL is fully and obviously valid, and if you get sued and you did infringe it then you're certain to lose.

>Out of curiosity, what is it that has you so bothered about the idea of viral licenses? What do you find so objectionable about attaching arbitrary terms to contracts?

Since I'm not the topic of discussion, I won't answer these questions beyond saying that I didn't opine on viral licenses.

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

#217

Post by znpy »

baron3dl wrote: post #127
sillysaurusx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i wish more people would publish the things that didn't work. i'd like everything, but the exploration of searched negative space is so wasteful.

I think you would be interested in the Journal of Trial and Error: https://journal.trialanderror.org/

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

#218

Post by kriro »

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of folks at Google who wish they never published the transformer paper.

This is also in line with my subjective experience as someone reading quite a few papers in the field: """The preprint also found that firms based in China consistently published more papers than their counterparts based in the United States."""

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

#219

Post by happymellon »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #206
fluoridation wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So if I pay you a recurring fee to publish all your research on a given topic and then you fail to make good on that I can seek damages, right? Now what if I paid you a lump sum up front? Now what if I licensed a patent to you in place of that lump sum? What if instead of a patent it was the right to make use of a piece of software? Uh-huh... This doesn't answer my question of what terminating the agreement of acces…

> I've breached the conditions, therefore you terminate the agreement, therefore you revoke access. Am I missing anything? You're missing the part where I seek punitive and actual damages under the terms of the contract. No different than violating an NDA - I paid you a lump sum up front, after a while you breached the contract, the agreement is null and void, what's the consequence? > Well, the idea of viral abstrac…

Presumably they work for a FAANG and don't like the idea that the people would want to prevent looting the commons.
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