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Comment by cuuupid | Hacker News Reader

I really, really dislike when companies use GitHub to promote their product by posting a "research paper" and a code sample.

It's not even an SDK, library, etc., it's just advertising.

I've noticed a number of China-based labs do this; they will often post a really cool demo, some images, and then either an API or just nothing except advertising for their company (e.g. model may not even exist). Often they will also promise in some GitHub issue that they will release the weights, and never do.

I'd love to see some sort of study here, I wonder what % of "omg really cool AI model!!!" hype papers [1] never provide an API, [2] cannot be reproduced at all, and/or [3] promise but never provide weights. If this was any other field, academics would be up in arms about likely fraud, false advertising, etc.

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It's not just Chinese labs that do this, lots of companies upload a README to a GitHub repository then link that repository from the website, I guess so they can have a GitHub icon somewhere on the website?

Submission is basically a form for requesting access to their closed API (which ironically is called "OpenPlatform" for some reason).

> which ironically is called "OpenPlatform" for some reason

This is pretty weird, the original text is 开放平台, but it basically is another name for "API" in China.

Not sure who started this, but it's really popular, for example, WeChat has an "Open Platform": https://open.weixin.qq.com/. AliPay too: https://open.alipay.com/. And peak strangeness, Alibaba Cloud (whose API is largely an AWS clone): https://open.aliyun.com/

Same thing in English, you have huge enterprises which basically operate on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, and end up calling themselves things like "OpenAI".

It even bleeds into marketing pages, go to the Llama website and you see "open source model" plastered all over the place, completely misusing both the "open" and "source" parts of it.

How about OpenAI?

You mean the charity* foundation** Open***AI?

I'm one of the authors of the paper. Thanks for raising a good point. It will be better if we upload the paper to arxiv but it's MLK in the US so submissions will be delayed by a couple of days. And we just can't wait to share some of the knowledge we gained from our experiments. Hope they will be useful for the community. Would much appreciate it if you have an idea about a better site for this. That said our API requests are open and we'll roll out more in the next few days depending on our server resources.

These types of "repositories" should contain some kind of flag/indication that it contains no source code, similar to when a repo is archived

really? it takes like 1 second looking at the file structure to see what it is, maybe like 2 seconds if you’re hopeful “images” somehow refers to a dockerfile or something

…but they do provide an APi.

HN is really not beating the bikeshedding allegations

Do they? I see a note that says it will be "available soon"?

They don't it's just promised in the future™. And even then, it should be a webpage on their website or API documentation, not a GitHub repo.

It's not bikeshedding to expect a source code repository to have source code...

That is unfortunate but they do present some theoretical insights about scaling context length and probably a more efficient way to do RL. Even knowledge about it can have an effect on next iterations from other labs.

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