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AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

science.org

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

#91

Post by sieabahlpark »

londons_explore wrote: post #82
eikenberry wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they just skip the journals and publish the papers themselves? Sharing the research is the important part unless these are academics who are trying to get tenure, grants or such.

For the individual employees, having your name on a peer reviewed paper in a prestigious journal makes you far more employable elsewhere. Moreso if your current employer is a stealth AI startup which hasn't yet produced much notable. It also can encourage employees to work for fewer wages... 'If you do great work you can publish and then get a $$$$$$ job offer at OpenAI, or you can stay here and get equity in a fast…

[dead]

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

#92

Post by willmadden »

cortesoft wrote: post #89
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…

> 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?

Anthropic and OpenAI have proven themselves to be aspiring monopolists through their positions and actions. Why would you want to share your research with them?

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

#93

Post by ACCount37 »

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…

"Drop a preprint like it's a mic" is ML's new "publish".

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

#94

Post by notRobot »

cortesoft wrote: post #89
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…

> 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?

And crucially, you should want to others to build upon it, like you build upon so many that came before you.

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

#96

Post by ndriscoll »

odyssey7 wrote: post #19

Once something goes commercial, academics have to consider what progress would be research-worthy, rather than a half-baked prototype for a product or feature. Companies can’t be expected to publish their confidential and proprietary information about their feature development, and academics should consider projects that would have higher impact. If you’re taking up a seat in a PhD program tinkering with would-be fea…

> Companies can’t be expected to publish their confidential and proprietary information about their feature development,

Of course they can. Simply eliminate trade secret protections and NDAs, which have literally zero purpose for society and in fact undermine patents' incentive to publish. Give a one year grace period to apply for a patent. Patent protection should be designed to be only as long as needed to try to maximize the development/spread of technology, e.g. maybe 2-3 years for rapidly developing areas like ML.

We should all be expected to contribute whatever knowledge we find to the commons. It makes us all richer.

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

#97

Post by jeffbee »

willy_k wrote: post #81
larodi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It took 6 years to get from Attention Is All You Need to a consumer product. Up until ChatGPT’s release, LLMs were obscure and really were just fancier autocomplete. Deepmind was largely a speculative research division until Google decided to play catch up, and even that took a bit of time as they figured out how to proceed in a way that wouldn’t cannabalize search. So in short they didn’t realize the potential. That…

Google itself was shipping transformer-based features to consumers within 2 years, notably BERT for websearch.

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

#99

Post by karp773 »

> Moonshot AI, one of the Chinese startups included in the study, recently unveiled Kimi K3—one of the strongest open models to date—and publicly released its model weights through Hugging Face today.

...today? (emphasis is mine) And the author was so excited that decided to write up a paper and submit it to Science all in one day? Yeah, right. That's all you need to know who is moonshooting behind this paper.

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

#100

Post by xienze »

cortesoft wrote: post #89
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…

> 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?

There seems to be this mentality among a large number of people who publish open data/research/software that everything is fine as long as no one else makes money using it. The second that happens, they're furious and act as though someone unfairly profited off of their "unpaid labor" (read: that thing they did purely for the love of the game). I think it has to be some sort of feeling of resentment and/or stupidity that _they_ were the person with a million dollar idea that let it slip through their fingers.
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