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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

There is almost no benefit in publishing frontier research as a startup. People can try to argue it but it is not defensible. Publishing that kind of thing is a flex that companies risking nothing can do.

Cool for Google. Problematic if you are a startup.

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Google has been publishing frontier research since it was an early-stage startup (https://research.google/pubs/the-anatomy-of-a-large-scale-hy...).

Looks like that was published in 1998, but that's also the year they submitted their patent application for PageRank. So you couldn't use it because they didn't want to risk losing their budding search business to, say, Microsoft.

In later years Google generally published the details of a system after they moved to the next one, to stay ahead of their competition, or if they didn't see it as important to their business (most infamously the Transformer language model). It was still generous of them to share their research at all though, and this allowed their scientists to talk publicly about their research which is a huge plus.

Publishing is not fire and forget. You usually publish and then network your publication(s) in congresses, where you are approached by many people either working in closely related issues, or noticing your work is complementary to what they are doing. A lot of fruitful colabs start that way.

Also there are hybrid fairs with academic and market exhibitors in the same place, so you might find someone that sells something that fits your research. Some startups sprout from academia and keep being that hybrid for years (getting research grants but also selling something).

It is beneficial for society as a whole, even if it isn't beneficial to the founders and investors accrual of wealth.

Could be a good way to attract talents. Could be a good way to establish your name for a potential acquisition

I think talent would definitely take a startup that publishes more seriously, and it would be a smaller risk for top research talent to go somewhere where they can also publish than have to bear the full risk of their work at a no name startup not going anywhere

You can define benefit in a lot of different ways. Not everything is measured in money.

It depends - if you are looking to raise potentially billions of dollars, showing that you are contributing at SOTA level in GenAI through papers could be a good strategy.

Sure, but that means they should stop pretending that they are advancing scientific research, or pretending that their products are scientifically sound.

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