Howard: Traditional AI labs favor paper citations over bold innovation
Jeremy Howard · Jeremy Howard on Building 5,000 AI Products with 14 People (Answer AI Deep-Dive) · May 15, 2025 · at 26:22
Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.ai, critiques the incentives and operating models of traditional academic and corporate AI research labs.
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“It's very different to a research lab, which is like, hey, let's try and get lots of citations on a paper in a field that's so highly recognizable to its peers that they recognize it as being something they want to appear at their next conference, you know, which really encourages Things to be as familiar as possible, and evaluated on things that are similar as other things as possible, and really not be too bold, and to have people who fiddle around with researching stuff, and once they get to a point where it kind of looks like it could work, they then throw that away and go and do something else.”
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