alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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There is almost no benefit in publishing frontier research as a startup. People can try to argue it but it is not defensible. Publishing that kind of thing is a flex that companies risking nothing can do.
Cool for Google. Problematic if you are a startup.
> 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?
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.
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.
"Drop a preprint like it's a mic" is ML's new "publish".
Is this the "AI startups blog about discoveries rather than submitting to journals" phenomenon that TFA noted?
Are journals just too slow, hidebound, and predatory to be useful to this industry any more?