Posts Tagged ‘commons’
“Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations… a community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars”*…
The sharing of experimental results and the underlying data is critical to the advance of science. Indeed, when I had the chance to do a scenario planning exercise with a collection of the leading research university librarians in the U.S. a couple of decades ago, the biggest threat/fear they surfaced was the concern that the free and open exchange of ideas and data, as manifest formally in scientific publication and informally in the collegial cooperation among scientists, would be occluded by an increasing proprietary embrace of knowledge.
73% of geneticists surveyed in an article in the 23/30 January 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association agreed that although keeping data private may help the individual researcher, data hoarding is detrimental to the progress of science Still, sadly, that threat has grown since the turn of the millennium.
By way of current (and dramatic) example: as Celina Zhao reports, more than half of AI “unicorns” have never published a paper or preprint…
Today’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) startups make no shortage of bold promises. Their technologies, some boast, will revolutionize software development, drug discovery, and scientific research.
Yet a new preprint posted on 16 July on bioRxiv suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them. More than half of AI unicorns—private companies valued at more than $1 billion—have never played a leading role in publishing a scientific paper or preprint, according to the new analysis. Collectively, they accounted for just one in every 1000 AI papers published in 2025.
“For a field that is supposedly reshaping science and is so advanced in terms of scientific potential, not having any scientific documentation seems like a very weird paradox,” says paper co-author John Ioannidis, a metascientist at Stanford University [see here]. “How can you judge that what they say is real, validated, and reproducible?” The scarcity of publications, others say, also makes it harder to assess AI’s social impacts, including energy use and safety.
But University of Alberta AI ethicist Mohamed Abdalla says the findings reflect the incentives facing commercial AI developers, rather than solely a failure to uphold scientific norms. “It’s not the company’s job to advance science, right?” he says. “The company’s job is to advance money.”
Ioannidis has long studied how unicorns, particularly in biotech, engage with the scientific literature. (In 2015, he was the first to publicly scrutinize the lack of peer-reviewed studies produced by Theranos, the blood testing startup that proved to be based on fraudulent data.) He wondered whether AI unicorns would show similar patterns.
To find out, he and his team first identified all 317 unicorn AI companies that have existed from 1998 to 2025. Then, they searched for publications affiliated with these startups—including journal articles, conference papers, reviews, and preprints. They selected those where a company researcher played a leading role as a first or last author, indicating the startup had made a substantial contribution to the work. The final data set included 2077 final publications, comprising 1389 peer-reviewed papers and 688 preprints.
More than half of the startups had never produced a single qualifying paper, the analysis revealed. Scientific influence proved even more concentrated, with the top 5% of firms accounting for greater than 90% of all citations. OpenAI alone was responsible for nearly 40% of all citations in the data set, followed by the Chinese computer vision company Megvii and the platform Hugging Face. And even at the most prolific companies, much of the output came from the same small group of repeat authors. For example, despite OpenAI employing roughly 4500 people, only eight researchers had authored five or more qualifying papers.
The findings are unsurprising to some AI researchers given how the industry is structured. For example, unlike the pharmaceutical industry, where published discoveries can be protected by patents, AI companies have learned they often gain little from publicly disclosing technical advances, says Nur Ahmed, an AI researcher at the University of Arkansas. Google’s landmark 2017 paper on the transformer—the architecture that underpins today’s large language models—has become a classic cautionary example, Abdalla adds. Although Google patented aspects of the technology, “I don’t think anybody’s paying Google for that,” he says.
Startups also operate on much faster timelines than academia, where peer review can lumber on for months or even years. That’s why many AI companies have embraced what Avijit Ghosh, an AI policy researcher at Hugging Face, calls the “blogification” of research: announcing new models and releasing code or data sets through blog posts and technical reports rather than scientific journals. The new analysis didn’t track those outputs, he points out.
For Ghosh, the debate shouldn’t center on publishing in journals versus blogs. What matters is whether companies are releasing enough code, data sets, or model weights (the numbers that determine how a model interprets and responds to a prompt) for others to independently verify and build on their work, he says.
The preprint also found that firms based in China consistently published more papers than their counterparts based in the United States. Whereas leading U.S. frontier labs have increasingly kept the details of their most capable models secret or “closed sourced,” leading Chinese companies have embraced “open-source” models. Moonshot AI, one of the Chinese startups included in the study, recently unveiled Kimi K3—one of the strongest open models to date—and publicly released its model weights through Hugging Face today.
But whether models are open or closed, the rapid pace toward increasingly powerful generalist AI worries Emma Pierson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She argues AI research—whether published freely or kept secret—risks accelerating models that pose serious societal and safety concerns, including supercharging cyberattacks. “If we were racing forward on cancer-curing AI, I would be like, ’Fantastic, full steam ahead,’” she says. “But that’s not what we’re racing toward, right?”…
The secretive unicorns: “AI’s top startups are barely publishing their research,” from @science.org.
By way of example? In order to have a broader footprint in AI for (default proprietary) scientific discovery, Google moves away from a successful AI effort (that did publish): “Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team in strategy shift” (gift article from the FT). One wonders: when these LLMs run out of published papers on which to train, where (and how) will they source the knowledge they need to stay useful?
* Neil deGrasse Tyson
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As we share and share alike, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received patent No. 367,398 for ‘spur rowel’ barbed wire (consisting of spur shaped wheels with 8 or 10 points mounted between 2 wires). It was one of many patents for barbed wire (e.g., here), which spread across the American West rapidly (thanks, in no small measure to the guy featured in the almanac entry here)– and (by protecting farmers from foraging free-ranging cattle) paved the way for the expansion of wheat (and other kinds of) farming… even as it spelled the doom of a commons– the open range.
“The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order. Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. It marked a radical change in the attitudes of society toward the environment.”*…
Several days ago, juries in New Mexico and California found Facebook/Meta (and in California, also YouTube/Google) guilty of knowingly employing algorithms to serve content to minors that caused depression, anxiety, and other mental health harms… behavior par for the course of the (massive, “mechanical”) extractive behavior that is their business model. As NPR reports (on the California verdict):
While the financial punishment is miniscule for companies each worth trillions of dollars, the decision is still consequential. It represents the first time a jury has found that social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teenagers… The outcome of this case could influence thousands of other consolidated cases against the social media companies. The litigation has drawn comparisons to the legal crusade in the 1990s against Big Tobacco, which forced the industry to to stop targeting minors with advertising…
L. M. Sacasas draws on a comparison to the English “enclosure movement” (and here) to put the stakes of this battle against algorithmic extraction into historical context…
If you were to ask me something like “What’s the most urgent task before us?” or “What counsel do you have to offer in this cultural moment?” I would say this:
Resist the enclosure of the human psyche.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure there are other necessary and urgent tasks. But this would be my contribution to the conversation. I would be offering not only an imperative to pursue, but also, and perhaps more importantly, an analogy to clarify and interpret the techno-economic forces at play in a digitized society. Such analogies or concepts can be useful. They can crystalize a certain understanding of the world and catalyze action and resolve. They can be a rallying cry.
In any case, I’ll say it again: resist the enclosure of the human psyche.
Some of you may immediately intuit the force of the analogy, but I suspect it needs a little unpacking.
Here’s the short version: I’m drawing an analogy between a historical development known as the enclosure of the commons and the condition of the human psyche in the context of a digitized society. The enclosure of the commons is the name given to the centuries-long process by which lands available to the many were turned into a resource to be managed and extracted by the few. My claim is that structurally similar processes are unfolding with the aim of enclosing the human psyche and transforming it into a resource to be managed and extracted…
The longer version, which follows, unpacks that analogy and explains what the impact of “enclosing the human psyche” could– would likely– be. Sacasas concludes…
… The individual human psyche does not seem like a thing held in common. But, in fact, that presumption may itself be a symptom of the enclosure of the psyche, although there are certainly many other forces leading toward that same conclusion. What if the psyche were a thing held in common? That is to say, what if our purchase on reality and the emergence of the self depended on human relationships and communities? From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging.
I’ve elsewhere developed this point at greater length, but here I’ll only note Hannah Arendt’s warning that we are deprived of a “truly human life” when we are “deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things.”
That last bit about a common world of things, a material, not only virtual world, is key. The logic of enclosure seeks to lock us into a private virtual world of “bespoke realities,” thus excluding us from the common world of things that yields as well a public consciousness. As Arendt put it, “Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.”…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Enclosure of the Human Psyche“
* Ivan Illich, “Silence is a commons” in In the Mirror of the Past (to which Sacasas alludes in the essay linked above)
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As we cosset commons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1867 that a bilateral treaty was signed effecting the sale of Alaska by Russia to the United States. It was ratified on May15 and American sovereignty took effect on October 18 of that year. The price for the 586,412 square miles that changed hands was $7.2 million in 1867 (equivalent to about $132 million in 2024), or about $0.02 per acre ($0.37 per acre in 2024).
Relevantly to the piece above, the land was and is largely commonly held, by the federal government, by the state, and by Native American tribes. Only roughly 1% of Alaska is in private hands. But that sliver is growing as the Trump Administration moves to “liquidate” federal real estate holdings (sell them to private owners) and in the meantime, licenses huge swathes of Alaska for oil and gas development, mineral extraction, and the infrastrucutre (roads, pipelines) needed to service them. Alaskans are worried.
“What is missing from the policy analyst’s tool kit – and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization – is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts”*…
Further to yesterday’s post on privacy as a public good, a revisit of an apposite topic, the destructively-problematic concept of “The Tragedy of the Commons“…
In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest,’ he wrote. ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.’ Hardin’s argument made intuitive sense, and provided a temptingly simple explanation for catastrophes of all kinds – traffic jams, dirty public toilets, species extinction. His essay, widely read and accepted, would become one of the most-cited scientific papers of all time.
Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.
The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.
When it came to humans and their appetites, Hardin assumed that all was predestined. Ostrom showed that all was possible, but nothing was guaranteed. ‘We are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies nor free of moral responsibility,’ she told an audience of fellow political scientists in 1997…
Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight. Michelle Nijhuis (@nijhuism) explains: “The miracle of the commons.”
* Elinor Ostrom (who received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work)
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As we come together, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that a Conference of Governors, convened by President Theodore Roosevelt and focused on the issue of conservation, opened in Washington. The brainchild of Gifford Pinchot, Chief Forester of the U.S., it was attended by the governors of the states and territories, the members of the Supreme Court and the Cabinet, scientists, and other national leaders. Seven days later, the governors adopted a declaration supporting conservation. One result was The National Conservation Commission, appointed by Roosevelt later that year, which prepared the first inventory of the natural resources of the United States with chairmen for water, forests, lands, and minerals. The conference also led to annual governors’ conferences, and the appointment of 38 state conservation commissions.
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