AI's Top Startups Are Barely Publishing Their Research
Leading AI startups are increasingly withholding their research findings from the public domain. This trend of secrecy contrasts sharply with the open science tradition and limits the broader community's ability to verify and build upon new advancements. The lack of transparency raises concerns about the pace of innovation and the potential risks of unmonitored AI development.
The silence from the industry's biggest players suggests a shift away from open collaboration toward guarded proprietary advantage.
- ninjahawk1
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.
- noosphr
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.
- randomImmigrant
What the blogificafion of AI research has done is allowed all kinds of claims and terminology related to AI to be introduced and taken up in a manner replicating social media dynamics. And that is simply not healthy. We’re fast reaching a place where any claim can be backed up with a set of numbers from a number of experiments run in some gamified environment or the other, with little concern for if it all adds up to anything.
It’s a vicious loop, because this same junk then goes in to train the next models which help spit out the next set of models AND blogs/papers.
The net effect is not dissimilar to setting termites loose in a library.
- mdnahas
My worry is learning and innovation. When companies sold physical devices, other companies could learn from them and improve them. We invented patents to provide economic support for innovation.
But, with services, nothing is exposed. Every innovation can be a trade secret. That makes it harder to learn and harder for cross pollination of ideas.
It probably won’t be good for employees either. Another company won’t bid for your skills as high, since you will take a longer time to train to work on their system.
- alightsoul
It makes sense when there's at least two posts here on hacker news about model routers which just reimplement Sakana Fugu from its ICLR papers, as a for profit business without any revenue sharing with Sakana nor making them open source. Of course Sakana would want to keep their research private to prevent that from happening. Open router fusion is yet another reimplementation of Sakana Fugu.
- Aurornis
The article is vague about the companies in the paper, for some reason.
In the paper, OpenAI is at the top of the chart for cumulative citations. MEGVII, Hugging Face, Waymo, Momenta, Preferred Netowkrs, Anthropic, Owkin, and Databricks, and Aibee follow (in that order). Yes, that is citations, not publications, but they explain that they're trying to use that as a proxy for significance, albeit an imperfect one.
Companies like Google aren't included because they aren't unicorn startups.
- egonschiele
As far as I can tell, the paper never actually mentions the companies who aren't publishing papers. Open AI, Anthropic, and hugging face are all specifically mentioned as companies that do publish papers. Just FYI for anyone else who reads "AI's top startups" and immediately assumes OpenAI and Anthropic.
- paxys
I’m not sure why this is so surprising? AI company does not automatically mean research company. The vast majority of new startups popping up over the last few years have commercial motivations, and use models built by someone else. Why are you expecting them to publish scientific papers?
50% of startups contributing to public research is actually a crazy good outcome. That’s far more than I had expected.
- TimCTRL
Yet none of them would have been here if Google hadn't published "Attention is all you need", the irony.
- yalogin
How much research is a startup expected to do? Isn’t the point of a startup to accelerate productizing research? Unless they are multi billion dollar “startups” do we even expect any research out of them?