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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

#301

Post by epolanski »

yalogin wrote: post #276

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?

This so much I'm not sure what are we discussing about. That's how private research works, from semi conductors to pharma.

Academia has the incentive to publish because it's judged and funded on that metric.

Private enterprises do not have the same incentive, they are judged by the money they make, which depends on the products they create, which depends on having a technological edge over the competition in many fields.

Without those incentives, there would be no reason to invest and take risks in private research.

Thus, I'm not really understanding what is this discussion about, when this is the reality of every field.

Of course if you don't publish and don't patent there are also incentives for competitors to produce the same results and products, but that's part of the game.

It's really a system that works for everyone and protects and incentivizes investment. AI or pharma or polymers or engines, research requires funding, and funding wants mechanisms of returning money to investors, which obviously clashes with doing the work and publishing the results for free.

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

#302

Post by dataviz1000 »

adevalois wrote: post #281
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…

The startup landscape has also changed noticeable compared to 5 or 10 years ago. A team of smart/credible people could get funding for an idea and build a product + publish, knowing there was a six month lead time for anyone to copy them and ship. These days, the barrier to ship code is zero. People can copy your business over a weekend, so there is much more urgency to establish product market fit and build a “moat”…

Over the weekend, I analyzed public YouTube tutorials of 4 SaaS products in the same domain. Then I asked the coding agent to define an API where they converge — prior art. Today I'm working on creating dashboards that won't touch anyone's copyright or IP.

A couple of days ago, something interesting happened. The agent works in an iteration loop where each iteration is an endpoint. I let it run overnight. In the morning it was still cranking away even though it had finished all the API endpoints. It had found a changelog from one of the companies listing every single feature and bug, and decided on its own to implement every item as an iteration.

We are 2 to 3 months away from coding agents replicating solving the edge cases of most SaaS applications.

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

#303

Post by chasd00 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #284
adevalois wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The startup landscape has also changed noticeable compared to 5 or 10 years ago. A team of smart/credible people could get funding for an idea and build a product + publish, knowing there was a six month lead time for anyone to copy them and ship. These days, the barrier to ship code is zero. People can copy your business over a weekend, so there is much more urgency to establish product market fit and build a “moat”…

I think in theory this is true but in practice I don't see loads more good apps or products. There's a paradox here I think. I just don't see loads of quality competitors popping up I actually think it makes building something harder because the barrier to entry just gets higher somehow.

it goes to show that, despite what we want to think, developers just aren't that important. The code is maybe 10% of what it takes to make a business, even a software tech business, a success. So whether it's human generated or LLM generated, the code is just one slice of the pie that has to be complete and effective to make a product successful in the market.

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

#304

Post by ciphercipher »

znpy wrote: post #217
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 think you would be interested in the Journal of Trial and Error: https://journal.trialanderror.org/

a goldmine!

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

#305

Post by skinfaxi »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #187
fluoridation wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>terminate the agreement Meaning what? Claw back the ideas from people's minds? You can terminate the agreement in the sense that you revoke access to the paper, but presumably the person you find in breach has already used the research for something that you find them in breach for. You're kind of closing the gate after the horse has bolted. >sue for damages I honestly have no idea what damages you could claim from…

> Meaning what? Claw back the ideas ... If something is so obviously wrong then perhaps take a minute to consider that your interpretation isn't what the other party intended? If I pay you not to do something and then you breach the contract I can terminate the agreement and seek damages. Ditto if I pay you to repeatedly do something and then at some point you fail to do it. So if I pay you a recurring fee to publish…

This reads like a company requiring you to hand over your first-born kid in the TOS. I would happily be the test case and violate your license if you want to sue me!

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

#306

Post by fooker »

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…

I think, maybe you misunderstood my comment?

I'm all for LLMs producing good research. That's obviously happening right now.

What I said was people with good research being penalized for not knowing in-group language.

It's not a zero sum game.

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

#307

Post by fooker »

phoghed wrote: post #293
DonHopkins wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> genuinely good content, dismissed without deep engagement because it didn’t use the correct in group language, would have otherwise passed muster > genuinely bad content, dismissed after deep engagement You have to be misreading the GP on purpose. Maybe feed it to your LLM of choice next time before you rant at someone. The crux of their point is that outsiders have no mastery of this supposed specialized dialect,…

Exactly right.

Not only is it specialized, it also has its own field specific memes* and trends that evolve over time.

The purpose is mostly to signal "I'm one of you".

*memes as in the actual meaning of memes, not internet memes.

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

#308

Post by cmiles8 »

Honestly part of the challenge here is that they’re not really doing anything truly groundbreaking that everyone else doesn’t figure out on their own weeks later. That’s not an environment that fits the traditional “publish” mindset and is a big problem for these big labs as everything slides towards being an undifferentiated commodity.

We’ve really not had massive advancements in the last few years that weren’t quickly discovered/copied by everyone at the same time, just bigger models. Everyone has been just playing around with the same mathematical parlor tricks from the original breakthrough.

Until that changes I expect we’ll continue to see this arms-race-to-the-bottom as everyone is just battling to make a commodity vs true innovation that gives one startup a legit IP advantage over others.

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

#309

Post by brandonb »

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…

FWIW, several YC startups have also published ML research--there were several of us at the last NeurIPS. So perhaps this is a niche that startups can occupy if the big labs don't.
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