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- Hacker News
- I don't expect non-foundational or non-frontier startups to do, or publish much heavy hitting research. "AI" has become such a ubiquitous description, it is probably easier to find non-AI startups.by TrackerFF
- Do startups in other fields constantly publish their research?by raincole
- In biotech sometimes. It's a form of advertising.
- That was my first thought. In my experience, particularly with trading firms (the ones doing real science based prediction trading, not TA bullshit) do not publish ANYTHING at all, and haven't for 40+ years.
Think Renaissance Technologies or similar.
by xtracto - There is no reason to publish anything in the AI era until you have reaped as much benefit from it as you are satisfied with. "Building in public" and "Researching in public" now means someone can swoop in with an AI and copy you instantly and become your competition overnight. Keep secrets.
Even at work, I have come to realize if I simply horde my accumulated custom AI built tools and productivity boosting tricks for myself, I can make myself more competitive as an employee.
I think this is how you get hired now, not by having a good resume, but by making claims of having special processes and personal tooling design that gets massive productivity ROI.
by deadbabe - 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?by yalogin
- This so much I'm not sure what are we discussing about. That's how private research works, from semi conductors to pharma.
Academia has the incentive to publish because it's judged and funded on that metric.
Private enterprises do not have the same incentive, they are judged by the money they make, which depends on the products they create, which depends on having a technological edge over the competition in many fields.
Without those incentives, there would be no reason to invest and take risks in private research.
Thus, I'm not really understanding what is this discussion about, when this is the reality of every field.
Of course if you don't publish and don't patent there are also incentives for competitors to produce the same results and products, but that's part of the game.
It's really a system that works for everyone and protects and incentivizes investment. AI or pharma or polymers or engines, research requires funding, and funding wants mechanisms of returning money to investors, which obviously clashes with doing the work and publishing the results for free.
by epolanski - Perhaps I'm imagining it but the entire industry was build on published research, this "AI wave" is at odds with that and seems to be driven by greed (although they'll claim some arms race or something to help themselves sleep at night).
There should be a new ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) policy being pushed recognizing the important role this plays. Although ESG and all norms have been set aside in this grim new world it seems.
by KoolKat23 - Forget publishing, companies like misanthropic are buying rare books and destroying it.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
by cute_boi - > Perhaps I'm imagining it but the entire industry was build on public research
There is some excellent publicly-funded research in there, but pivotal papers like Attention Is All You Need and the numerous pivotal OpenAI publications were privately funded.
OpenAI is at the top of the chart in the study.
I think you're bringing some assumptions into this conversation that aren't supported by the evidence.
by Aurornis - Some companies are sharing their research. Mostly not the American ones
Example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24653
Exceptions to some like Deepmind, Nvidia, and Thinking Machines
by janalsncm - > Perhaps I'm imagining it
You are not. A disproportionate amount of value in the computing industry was created by <strike>geniuses</strike> decently smart people who worked together and who decided to just tell people how to do things instead of trying to capture the value of being the first person to figure out how to do those things.
This observation pre-dates the current wave of AI hype by a half century or so.
> driven by greed
I can only speak for myself.
For me it's exactly the opposite. If I want to explain how something works, I can just... do that. If I want to share an artifact demonstrating how to solve a particular type of problem, I can just... do that. If I want to mentor/teach, I can just... do that.
Doing those things within the confines of Academia Approved Institutions is exhausting and distracting.
To wit, and the actual point of this post: the term "Publishing Research" in this article doesn't mean "post it on a .html page and share the source code". It means engaging in a very specific and peculiar and extremely political modality of communication.
And it really only makes sense to do that specific and peculiar and political thing you're at a stage in your professional/personal development where you need to play that particular prestige game. (Which there's nothing wrong with, but it is a deeply cargo culted version of the actual scientific process.)
by fultonn - Yet none of them would have been here if Google hadn't published "Attention is all you need", the irony.by TimCTRL
- Oh that built on a bunch of ideas that weren’t far off. It was a great discovery but like many it’s standing in tall shoulders
- yes. and MapReduce, Borg research earlier inspiring creation of similar a decade long transforming forces - Hadoop and Docker/Kubernetes. Geoffrey Hinton once said after ChatGPT, Google had all secret sauces. may be going all-in means risking own well established business model (Google) but cat was out shifting attention elsewhere, eventually Google coughing up owing vertical stack (Chips, Models, Cloud, Consumer Market) and Saga continues...by anilraut30
- The authors of that paper are all at AI companies not named Google.by arjie
- Even Google wouldn't be here.
It was kind of like radiation science before WWII, it would be freely published because it wasn't potentially world changing yet. After it became a government interest, even people doing things unrelated to weapons would be much more apt to hold their work close.
by pixl97 - The irony may only just be unfolding - check out this paper from 2015:
https://research.google/pubs/distilling-the-knowledge-in-a-n...
# LLM generated summary of the implied irony
Google may consider the standalone frontier-model arms race economically irrational, while still considering frontier-model capability strategically indispensable. Its longer game is probably not to avoid building the biggest models, but to build only enough of them to serve as capability factories—then turn that intelligence into a much larger population of cheap, purpose-built models.
(Human again) If Google knew what they were on to, why wouldn’t they make it their secret weapon from the start? I suspect it’s because they predicted there would be an arms race, and knew how to profit from it. They had a distillation paper published before “Attention is all you need”. In hindsight, is it ironic at all? Or is it obvious?
- 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.
by paxys - When the second biggest player is named 'OpenAI', I would expect some papers to be published.by HDBaseT
- in most fields its normal for research to become IP rather than papers to keep competitive edge. so this seems really normal stuff tbh...
also, first people complain that only AI companies publish on AI, and now they complain the same companies stop those same publications :'). it is never good.
- Also the reason we fund science publicly is because we can't count on the incentives from the free market. I mean why would they share information with competitors?
- 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.by egonschiele
- From a quick skim, the paper does a really bad job at answering the question in everyone’s mind when they see the title. Like, OpenAI is at the top in terms of citations, but as we all know old influential papers tend to accumulate more citations, and there was a period when OpenAI was, you know, more open… Are they still contributing now, post Altman pivot? No idea from the paper (maybe I missed it). In fact papers after 2025 are explicitly excluded, and we’re probably more interested in access to the cutting edge.
Anyway, there’s a repo link https://github.com/q5loisel/unicorn-AI-startup-publications so someone more determined at getting a better answer can poke at it.
by oefrha - 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.
by Aurornis - weird, for so long I'm damn sure that researchers are obligatory to release research papers to fulfill their quotas. otherwise they will lost their titles.
so unless those companies (openai, anthropic) gave the researchers some fortune big enough to make them give up their research careers, they will keep publish research papers. aka it is not the good will of those companies.
by npn - databricks is a top ai startup?. i thought they did spark hosting or something.
what makes them a top ai startup
by dominotw - Google published a lot. I still wonder this original transformer paper, and the attention, etc. Why would they allow it to let go in the open? Perhaps because was intended for translation first before someone decided to loop it over itself? Or was so obscure to fellow researchers what do they actually publish?by larodi
- 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.
- How is that different from traditional research publication? It's faster?by gowld