AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

Post by alt227 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

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.

Post by phoghed » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #234

fooker wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publishing CS papers at the top venues requires using in-group language and formalism that is pretty much inaccessible to someone who has not done a PhD in that specific narrow field. LLMs are pretty good at this, hilariously. This means a genuinely good paper by an outsider has significantly less chance of getting good reviews than AI slop.

If an LLM can present good research in the field's required dialect better than a human outsider can, calling the result "AI slop" tells us nothing about its quality -- only about your prejudice against how it was produced. And when that prejudice degrades the quality of your own thinking and writing, you're producing "human slop", which is considerably more tragic: you ought to be capable of doing better than the AI…

Post by 1718627440 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #280

1718627440 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the point he is making does not apply to open source, but rather to freeware (which is open source too). Open source can be completely B2B, without releasing it to third parties. Also open source is not free software, so you can also forbid your costumers from sharing the source further. EDIT: That's crap. I only thought about the aspect of continuing sharing, but if you also don't want your direct customers to…

It seems you are confusing source-available and open source. One of the criteria of open source is free redistribution. If your license forbids sharing the source then it's not open source. In practice, if you use an actual open source license in a B2B setting, it's best to assume that your software will become available to the general public (e.g. it just takes one person to publish it on GitHub).

Post by epolanski » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 1:15 PM UTC

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…

Post by smcg » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

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.