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by anentropic 1142 days ago
Given that fact, why don't the paper authors just release the artefacts then?

If it's supposed to stay secret, what's the point of "here's instructions for how to reproduce our big secret"?

Presumably the societal purpose of papers is to share knowledge, and the individual purpose is to take credit and win prestige.

It seems like the first purpose would be better served by also publishing code etc, and the second purpose wouldn't be harmed by it?

2 comments

Because the authors don’t get a large reward for open sourcing the work and they stand to lose future value by lowering the gate to competition. You may want the code, but Google will not care (or it might dislike it).

Look at GPT-3+, OpenAI gets fame and fortune while people struggle to reproduce their last-gen models.

Probably because the research code is not as nice as one rewritten from scratch anyways, and it's using internal data sets / APIs.

They just want to get onto the next research instead of taking time to publish a clean open-source implementation, which can (and will) be done by somebody else anyways.