Comment by noosphr
5 hours ago
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.
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?
If you want people to copy it, but want a 20 year temporary monopoly, you can publish an open source step-by-step guide for someone to recreate what you’re doing with the patent office.
The patents are effectively unenforcible. People stopped patenting frontier computer science research 20 years ago. That is the current reality.
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And crucially, you should want to others to build upon it, like you build upon so many that came before you.
If your perception of a moat is worth more than the GDP of most countries, publishing anything must seem like a bad idea. Much less helping others build upon your work.
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?
For researchers, yes.
For startups, no, because the point of that is to make money.
So why is op trying to publish?
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That's not really a common attitude in academia, unfortunately.
The most common attitude is something closer to "I want to be well known and respected by smart and influential people". In short, prestige.
People using your work is a side effect of success, but simultaneously threatens your ownership of your "brand". If they significantly improve upon the thing you did, your work could be made irrelevant, your prestige ruined.
Huh? Wouldn’t their prestige be improved if some other group spent a lot of effort improving on it?
That would clearly demonstrate it had real substance beyond hot air or puffery.
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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.
It's not that difficult. You invest effort into research in the hope it'll give you a competitive edge. If someone else can come along and reproduce your results practically at a much lesser cost, then you lose that competitive edge. You're back at square one, except you've lost the cost of the research.
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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?
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 growing startup. If however your work doesn't do well, you walk away from a bankrupt startup with worthless shares and minimum wage'
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The article is complaining that research isn't peer reviewed and research is turning into blogs. I'm explaining why that's the best outcome possible and why in a field as hot as large dl models you won't even get that.
I thought parent post was saying that they didn't publish them at all after they had so much trouble with the journals. If they did publish the papers themselves then I don't see the problem. The article itself read to me as your standard journal rent seeking and I wasn't really responding to it.
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Same reason movies released on YouTube aren’t treated with the same respect as those released in theaters.
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.
Can you share a link to the preprint?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.02.471005v2....
"Drop a preprint like it's a mic" is ML's new "publish".