[darosati]

I just want to push back on Academic Machine Learning is a (low quality with no novelty) paper mill and devaluing researchers efforts.

To be clear ML research has “paper mill” problems but we should be careful that we don’t imply that there are only “rare successes”

There are many many amazing results published at ICLR, NeurIPs, ICML every year that are important developments that are not only research successes but also commercial and open source success stories. For example LoRA and DPO are two recent incredible development and these are not “rare” - this years ICLR had many promising results that will in turn be built on to produce the next “transformer” level development. Without this work there are no transformers.

Even transformers themselves were a contribution whose impact only became valuable through the work of many researches improving the architecture and finding applications (for example LLMs were not a given use case of transformers until additional researches put the work in to develop them)