AI's top startups are barely publishing their research • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by muragekibicho » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:05 AM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #37

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…

databricks is a top ai startup?. i thought they did spark hosting or something. what makes them a top ai startup

They just raised their series Z or something lol.

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

#272

Post by ryan_n » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:11 AM UTC

ninjahawk1 wrote: post #134

colingauvin wrote: post #125

Earlier 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…

Hmm I might be completely missing something here (I’m not a machine learning person), but how is that “pro-active”? The mode is still taking in an input (or several inputs maybe in this case) and responding to that input, isn’t it? It doesn’t seem much different than current capabilities of the various agentic harnesses on the market right now. Again, apologies if I’m missing something obvious here…

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

#273

Post by aatd86 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:15 AM UTC

sixtyj wrote: post #246

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.

I had some meeting with non-creative business person, just chatting over coffee. I wondered how much he used from our meeting for his enrichment. Public papers with described research give advance to similar people. They jump over you and in many cases they give nothing back. (Intellectual) greed is everywhere and is cross-border. In case of public papers there is one extra vulnerability - competitor(s) can build any…

It can protect you from someone patenting the same idea though.

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

#274

Post by tanker_war » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:16 AM UTC

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…

The publication model in academia is predatory and elitist, but have you considered that your paper just wasn't that good?

Almost every scientific paper published in every field is "world first" research, and the job of tier 1 journals is to decide what deserves to be signal boosted, and what doesn't.

This response to rejection to me confirms the fears implicit in the article linked above. Not only is private AI research not transparent and not documenting its work, it also has a deep rooted culture issue.

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

#275

Post by anilraut30 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:30 AM UTC

TimCTRL wrote: post #2

Yet none of them would have been here if Google hadn't published "Attention is all you need", the irony.

yes. and MapReduce, Borg research earlier inspiring creation of similar a decade long transforming forces - Hadoop and Docker/Kubernetes. Geoffrey Hinton once said after ChatGPT, Google had all secret sauces. may be going all-in means risking own well established business model (Google) but cat was out shifting attention elsewhere, eventually Google coughing up owing vertical stack (Chips, Models, Cloud, Consumer Market) and Saga continues...

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

#276

Post by yalogin » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:35 AM UTC

How much research is a startup expected to do? Isn’t the point of a startup to accelerate productizing research? Unless they are multi billion dollar “startups” do we even expect any research out of them?

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

#277

Post by jmalicki » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:36 AM UTC

aatd86 wrote: post #273

sixtyj wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had some meeting with non-creative business person, just chatting over coffee. I wondered how much he used from our meeting for his enrichment. Public papers with described research give advance to similar people. They jump over you and in many cases they give nothing back. (Intellectual) greed is everywhere and is cross-border. In case of public papers there is one extra vulnerability - competitor(s) can build any…

It can protect you from someone patenting the same idea though.

I don't understand why from a legal perspective, but it seems like over the last decade or more the tech industry stopped caring about patents. Startups used to talk about their parents and large tech companies would encourage you to file. While people say software patents make no sense, when I've seen cases involving EE, ME, and software patents, the software patents are usually the most likely to hold up in court and get damages.

Empirically noone seems to care anymore.

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

#278

Post by kortilla » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:39 AM UTC

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…

You keep handwaving away any requests for something concrete to discuss. If it’s so easy to construct a viral license for access to science, just give an example of it.

> 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?

The only example of them is open source that is routinely violated because it’s so weak in practice. LLMs reproduce it frequently with no attribution and nobody is successfully suing them over this.

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

#279

Post by jmalicki » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:39 AM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #245

fc417fc802 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it was a joke and is obviously quite silly but I believe it would be enforceable to the extent that the licensor could terminate the agreement and sue for damages. If I can agree to pay you not to talk about something (ie an NDA) or not to work in a field (ie a non-compete clause) then why can't I pay you to be required to publish all future work you do in a given area? ("All future work" might well be overly br…

The problem with research is that you are supposed to be creating novel works, not derivatives. This means you are creating IP, not modifying.

All research builds upon previous ideas.

E.g. you can patent a novel idea that would require licensing another patent to use.

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

#280

Post by olalonde » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:41 AM UTC

1718627440 wrote: post #254

fluoridation wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point?

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).