That pesky “scientific method” bothers these corps sometimes, so one can play fast and loose with numbers and conclusions for all sort of reasons. No need to worry about reproducibility, rigor, scrutiny, etc. not good for IPO and stocks.

Top line difference is speed. The impact of speed is deeper and gets felt over time.

Traditional research publications are no angels. They gatekeep research, and also allow financial incentives to drive them to publish junk with their stamp on it.

But a flood of papers doesn’t actually mean more knowledge. In bypassing this route entirely, AI has swiftly lost the ability to engage with itself as a field. And the cost of that is only beginning to be felt.

It's rather similar to publishing a non-peer-reviewed preprint on arXiv.

That plus leaning on legacy reputation of journals or schools, instead of open websites and virality.

No traditional research is mostly done by post-docs and have a phd level of education rather than a tech bro that passed leetcode. That seems like a good bar to have; not too mention the whole peer review thing, hard to really understand anything if you purposely withhold it and tell people to kick rocks.