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

221–230 of 341 posts

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

#221

Post by nicbou »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #188
chrisweekly wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! And, whether it stems from research or not, putting yourself out there and talking to other people is one of the most fundamentally important things you can do for your career and your personal development as a human being.

Tell that to my tinder profile. I jest, no tinder. But still, be ready for a lot of non-responses if you're not actively in college. It can feel like a lonely world out there despite theoretically being hundreds of potential people you'd be able to talk to for hours.

I think that accepting rejection is part of the being extroverted and meeting strangers. It’s better than waiting for the perfect opening or only talking to people you are sure will be receptive.

Or so I was told.

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

#222

Post by thayne »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #136
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…

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.

It is beneficial for society as a whole, even if it isn't beneficial to the founders and investors accrual of wealth.

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

#223

Post by okaleniuk »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #208
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…

Tier 1 journals have high standards (that's why they're tier 1) and they also have hundreds of submissions every cycle. It's common to have a paper rejected. On the upside you get your work seen by some of the most experienced researchers in AI, who are also specialists in your paper's subject. For example, here's the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research: https://jmlr.org/editorial-board.html S…

The alternative is to use your network directly. The very notion of "I'll publish my work and someone will notice me" is wrong. Most people in academia are too concentrated on their own work to care about yours. The only minority that cares is already in your contact list.

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

#224

Post by TeMPOraL »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #204
fc417fc802 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chemists published freely until dyes started being worth money Notably this is exactly what patents are intended to combat. And while US IP law is clearly very broken it does at least largely accomplish this stated goal. Much (but certainly not all) industrial chemistry has made it into the academic literature. Not that the same logic necessarily applies to AI research (ie algorithms aka math and their implementati…

>> To your dye example, yttrium indium manganese blue was the first commercially viable inorganic blue pigment discovered in ~200 years, is the only known environmentally safe one, and was openly published in the literature. It's also under an exclusive license. Gee, I wonder what was wrong with the previous blue pigments and why it was so important to have this one under an exclusive license. Cobalt blue is a blue p…

> P.S. Don't lick your brushes.

Cobalt poisoning sounds scary, but I see nothing on the linked Wikipedia page that would present a risk of accidental consumption of medically relevant amounts of cobalt, whether in one sitting or through prolonged exposure.

I mean, I assume Canada stopped adding it to their beer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#Toxicity).

Though the mention of Bolesławiec makes me worried a little; my wife loves their designs and we have a bunch of plates and bowls and such from them, and we serve food on/in them regularly...

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

#226

Post by thayne »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #137
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?

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.

Unfortunately, there is an incentive to make the patent application contain just enough detail that a patent clerk with relatively little knowledge of the subject will grant a patent, but not enough detail that an expert would be able to follow to get the same result in practice.

Also 20 years is a crazy long time in some industries (like most software).

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

#227

Post by bonoboTP »

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.

Everyone says this in the abstract but to concrete examples they shug and say, of course that approach doesn't work, they did X, Y, Z wrong, they should have given it more effort, it could have worked if done properly / this can obviously never work, everyone knew already, it's nothing new etc.

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

#228

Post by TeMPOraL »

lenerdenator wrote: post #141
perpetuallunch wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously.

To rephrase it more bluntly: the difference between normal business and a modern startup is that between a cow bred for milking vs. a pig bred for slaughter.

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

#230

Post by worldthruword »

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…

>> Chemists published freely until dyes started being worth money, and then the interesting work moved into company labs and stopped coming out.

I think this also makes the case for Industrial Espionage

Post reply on HN