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Comment by llm_trw | Hacker News Reader

Do you know what places people who are interested in research congregate at? Every forum, meet up or journal gets overwhelmed by bullshit with a year of being good.

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Universities (at least certain ones) and startups (more in absolute terms than universities, but there's also a much bigger fraction of swindlers). Most blogs and forums are garbage. If you're not inside these ecosystems, try to find out who the smart/talented people are by reading influential papers. Then you can start following them on X, linkedin etc. and often you'll see what they're up to next. For example, there's a pretty clear research paper and hiring trail of certain people that eventually led to GPT-4, even though OpenAI never published anything on the architecture.

I am in correspondence with a number of worth while authors, it's just that there isn't any place where they congregate in the (semi) open and without the weirdos who do stuff with the models you're missing out on a lot.

My favorite example I can never share in polite company is that the (still sota) best image segmentation algorithm I ever saw was done by a guy labeling parts of the vagina for his stable diffusion fine tune pipeline. I used what he'd done as the basis for a (also sota 2 years later) document segmentation model.

Found him on a subreddit about stable diffusion that's now completely overrun by shitesters and he's been banned (of course).

It's pretty easy nowadays to come up with a narrow domain SOTA in image tasks. All you need to do is label some pictures and do a bit of hyperparameter search. This can literally be done by high schoolers on a laptop. And that's exactly what they do in those subreddits where everyone primarily cares about creating explicit content. The real frontier for algorithmic development is large domains (which need a lot more data by default as well). But there actually are some big-game explicit content platforms engaged in research in this area and they have shown somewhat interesting results.

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