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Comment by biggodoggo | Hacker News Reader

The problem is when BigCo does AI research, they are not doing it for the greater good, they are trying to find a competitive edge. Unfortunately there are no good incentives (besides doing the "right" thing) for companies to open their datasets to the public, so until there is we can expect more of the same...

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>they are not doing it for the greater good, they are trying to find a competitive edge

thats just fine. they don't really need to publish anything, but if they do want to publish it, it should be done in a way other people can reproduce their findings.

This isn't fair to researchers at companies. While the goal of the organization may be to make money, the goal of the individual researchers who publish the papers is very likely doing it for the greater good.

Yeah, I don't see that. If you're an employee of a company (not least one who's paying you a very fat salary) there is an expectation that you will do work that benefits the company's bottom line. If that happens to be aligned with the "greater good" then OK, but there is no such guarantee- and if it isn't... well then your research will only benefit the company.

Of course your work benefits the bottom line, but being able to publish is often a perk that companies have to give to be able to attract and keep people who care about those things. It's actually incredibly insulting that you would assume you know the motivations of individual employees.

The world isn't as black and white as you'd like it to be.

If journals/conferences were to refuse un-replicable results, companies that wish to offer this perk would have to make a sufficient part of their dataset public in order to offer this perk to their employees. This would be a good thing.

Fair enough, so don’t publish them. If you can’t replicate results, it really isn’t science.

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