AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

Post by witx » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:25 AM UTC

nlitened wrote: post #243

witx wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know also what was the biggest help for these companies? All the data they scrapped from the internet, the books they torrented, the open source projects whose licenses they did not respect. The least these companies can do is to publish everything they own

> The least these companies can do is to publish everything they own Well, being able to talk to superintelligent all-knowing savant 24/7 on your phone for $20 a month is also something

Post by saidnooneever » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:26 AM UTC

HDBaseT wrote: post #60

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.

When the second biggest player is named 'OpenAI', I would expect some papers to be published.

Post by leoh » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

larodi wrote: post #65

Aurornis wrote: post #32

The 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…

Google published a lot. I still wonder this original transformer paper, and the attention, etc. Why would they allow it to let go in the open? Perhaps because was intended for translation first before someone decided to loop it over itself? Or was so obscure to fellow researchers what do they actually publish?

Post by wisty » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #164

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…

> 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…

Post by locknitpicker » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:47 AM UTC

don_esteban wrote: post #215

locknitpicker wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…