Comment by ninjahawk1
3 hours ago
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.
That's also a reason the big labs stopped. Publishing is most valuable to people who have no other way to get the attention of smart strangers. Once you can hire nearly anyone and everyone already returns your calls, the main remaining effect of publishing is to tell your competitors which things worked.
This is what happens to every field as it turns from a science into an industry. Chemists published freely until dyes started being worth money, and then the interesting work moved into company labs and stopped coming out.
Which is a very ironic and selfish situation when your business model dependent mostly on model training based on available published data, academic and non-academic.
That's why we should enforce copyleft
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There are other reasons. One is for career development of your researchers. Another is to be good citizens, in good standing, in the community of scientific researchers. Another is to flex on people and buy class and respectability - to comport oneself as the “old money” does.
i wish more people would publish the things that didn't work. i'd like everything, but the exploration of searched negative space is so wasteful.
This academic publish and industry doesn't is an incorrect view. Academics also hold off from publishing groundbreaking science in order to protect their research edge. You shouldn't see this as industry bad as driven by profits and academia is free from career incentives and money.
Curious what you mean by proactive? Could you share a bit more?
Happily, current AI is interacted with in a reactive loop. I open the Claude app, CLI, whatever, say my prompt, get an output.
I personally wanted an AI that was able to reach out to me about my life before I had to reach out to it. An example, a friend just emailed me asking to meet for at 1pm but I have class at 1:30, so a proactive AI would see that conflict and send me a notification about it, asking if the proposed email it drafted works, then I press send.
My personal setup tracks my mouse movement, keyboard, what’s on my screen, and keeps track of what I’m working on through files on my PC. It can update the backend and then restart it on it’s own, meaning I can develop the thing itself while being away from my PC.
The capabilities are more than what I’ve listed, but I want to avoid being too preachy about something I made. Here’s the repo if you wanted to take a look, it’s open-source and connects to the iPhone app:
https://github.com/getorb/Orb-Backend
I'm very interested in this kind of thing as a kind of ADHD brain augment, like it's monitoring my slack, github, email, calendar, active terminals, etc, and helps me prioritize what I should work on as well as weighing whether this or that ping is worth interrupting me for.
I assumed that's what openclaw basically was, but is Orb different from that? And is it fundamentally a different model from the request/response, or is it just request/response in an autonomous loop?
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> An example, a friend just emailed me asking to meet for at 1pm but I have class at 1:30, so a proactive AI would see that conflict and send me a notification about it, asking if the proposed email it drafted works, then I press send.
I don't mean to downplay your work, but I think you should come up with a better example use case. Automating away interactions with friends is pretty much the last thing I want AI to do.
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What’s so innovative to send an auto message every x time or based on events: “wake up and check if you got anything to do”.
OR
“Event x happened at y time”
Recursive self improvement is the beginning of the end.
it's actually the end of the beginning, there's walls that self-improving models hit that are never overcome even when given vast amounts of time.
ChatGPT 5.6 Sol ultra still can get basic things written cleanly. I still need to tweak it quite a few times to get it right. Super useful but if you vibe code you’re in a huge mess after 1 billion tokens.