Comment by cortesoft
5 hours ago
> 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?
5 hours ago
> 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.
good.
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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?
Arguably, the point of a startup isn’t to make money, it’s to attract attention and then investors.
Once the business is making money it’s not really a startup any more, it’s a going concern.
OP is an undergrad student. Attracting attention is what will make them stand out. And sharing research at this stage will probably expose them to research others don’t want to publish but do want to share with other researchers.
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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.
I would presume that if their results end up being more impactful or interesting, you end up being a footnote and lose the spotlight.
You could be proven wrong and wither in to obscurity.
Better to silo yourself and move in to the penthouse.
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.
Hence why most companies don't publish research and most software is proprietary. Publishing and open source only make sense in certain situations.
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