alt Hacker NewsAI's top startups are barely publishing their research
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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 to show for six months of work. The papers only come with the pitch deck.
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.
Companies like Google aren't included because they aren't unicorn startups.
What the blogificafion of AI research has done is allowed all kinds of claims and terminology related to AI to be introduced and taken up in a manner replicating social media dynamics. And that is simply not healthy. We’re fast reaching a place where any claim can be backed up with a set of numbers from a number of experiments run in some gamified environment or the other, with little concern for if it all adds up to anything. It’s a vicious loop, because this same junk then goes in to train the next models which help spit out the next set of models AND blogs/papers. The net effect is not dissimilar to setting termites loose in a library.
As far as I can tell, the paper never actually mentions the companies who aren't publishing papers. Open AI, Anthropic, and hugging face are all specifically mentioned as companies that do publish papers. Just FYI for anyone else who reads "AI's top startups" and immediately assumes OpenAI and Anthropic.
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.
Yet none of them would have been here if Google hadn't published "Attention is all you need", the irony.
Perhaps I'm imagining it but the entire industry was build on published research, this "AI wave" is at odds with that and seems to be driven by greed (although they'll claim some arms race or something to help themselves sleep at night).
There should be a new ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) policy being pushed recognizing the important role this plays. Although ESG and all norms have been set aside in this grim new world it seems.
Several things can be true simultaneously:
The process and standards of peer-reviewed publication are tedious. If the objective is efficient communication of knowledge, this is not the process that maximizes that outcome. This process is about credentials and imprimatur, not communication.
Academic publication is largely chasing prestige. The value of prestige accrues more to the individual than the company employing the individual. Incentives for companies reflect this.
Many blogified publications are unqualified slop. This sounds like an indictment but a lot of academic peer-reviewed research is also low-quality slop. In many domains, slop is rewarded, devaluing the contributions of people publishing more serious research, which affects incentives. The signal-to-noise ratio has been poor for decades no matter where you get your knowledge.
Any good research you publish will be exploited against you in myriad ways. It is effectively impossible to assert any IP rights. Research turns into a pure cost center if you treat it this way. Companies recognize this and have adapted to reflect it. In some computer science domains the state-of-the-art has been buried in trade secrets for decades such that the academic literature is embarrassingly obsolete.
Publication costs time and money. Given all of the above, why would you invest productive capacity in public communication of research results? The researchers want to work on interesting problems, the companies want to maximize the leverage from their research. Publishing delivers neither.
A lot of fundamental research is done for the purpose of solving a problem, not publishing a paper. Their motivation and personal reward is solving the problem, not publishing it. Once they've solved it, it is no longer interesting and they are on to the next interesting problem.
Some research is coupled with national security considerations. If you do frontier research this is always sitting in the background.
All of this is a consequence of incentives. A large percentage of all basic research no longer happens in academia. I've greatly enjoyed participating in non-publishing research programs. I also understand why they don't publish. I've done a significant amount of interesting foundational research under my own auspices where it was not worth the effort to publish. I'm not chasing prestige, I had a problem I needed to solve.
No one should be surprised by any of this.
"But University of Alberta AI ethicist Mohamed Abdalla says the findings reflect the incentives facing commercial AI developers, rather than solely a failure to uphold scientific norms. “It’s not the company’s job to advance science, right?” he says. “The company’s job is to advance money.”"
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If everyone holds back their publications, the whole sector moves slower. Yes, it's moving alarmingly fast according to many, but is it moving fast enough that the massive investments in data centres will actually pay off?
It's more game theory. Things may go well for one selfish company not publishing in a sea of altruists who publish, but perhaps not if everyone else is selfish too.
Many AI startups open source part of their work and write blog posts without publishing papers, including the startup I work for. Sometimes, startups just have for more pressing things to do and don't have time to write up scientific papers for publishing.
Also, there are simply too many AI papers that make peer-review publishing quite meaningless these days (e.g., AAAI this year got more than 50K submissions).
I don't expect non-foundational or non-frontier startups to do, or publish much heavy hitting research. "AI" has become such a ubiquitous description, it is probably easier to find non-AI startups.
Author requests open weights from Sam Altman
Do startups in other fields constantly publish their research?
Hmmmm I wonder why, so interesting
I'm under the impression that the majority of startups go nowhere, so the fact that they don't have this property is not itself a major statement about the field as a whole.
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 feature ideas for an existing major tech company, you should really just get hired by that tech company, where the resources are abundant and the degree is not required.
Frontier AI research is not only under incredible commercial pressure but it’s also a geopolitical advantage.
I don’t think Dario wants to be a monopolist. But history is full of brilliant people who focused on the social good as priority #1 and lost the game early.
Once you lose the game and go bankrupt you can’t do anything. Same as politics, if you’re not elected you can’t change anything. Of course there are many lines not worth crossing.
Who's this'Al' I keep seeing in the headlines?
Startups exist to profit, not necessarily publish.
All startups barely publish their research, because doing that would be incredibly stupid for the most part, because they want to sell the stuff they invent not give it away for free.
> 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.
There is no reason to publish anything in the AI era until you have reaped as much benefit from it as you are satisfied with. "Building in public" and "Researching in public" now means someone can swoop in with an AI and copy you instantly and become your competition overnight. Keep secrets.
Even at work, I have come to realize if I simply horde my accumulated custom AI built tools and productivity boosting tricks for myself, I can make myself more competitive as an employee.
I think this is how you get hired now, not by having a good resume, but by making claims of having special processes and personal tooling design that gets massive productivity ROI.
Funny, as ONE PERSON with Claude, I've been on a tear when it comes to publishing my own research:
https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Magarshak%...
So I know that smart people in those companies can definitely publish. In fact, a whole team should probably be publishing like no tomorrow!
Trade secrets are back, baby!
More to the point, without determining how much work is “worthy” of a paper it is unclear how much this matters.
Most AI companies are either a product and marketing layer over a model or not meaningfully moving any dimension to be worthy of a paper.
Also, formal papers and blogs and “cards” are all being intertwined.
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> “If we were racing forward on cancer-curing AI, I would be like, ’Fantastic, full steam ahead,’” she says. “But that’s not what we’re racing toward, right?”
We're not racing towards anything. We've been going in circles for years.
gate keepers of antiquated practice decry people realizing they they dont need to get past the gate
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 since we had overlapping results and different methods, specifically different assumptions.
I say all that to say, as a physics student getting my undergrad, simply doing independent research and speaking to experts about it enabled me to network with someone I otherwise likely wouldn’t know. For young people getting into any business, research is a great way to meet new people.