@tszzl @AdrienLE @beffjezos in the form of staff leaving? or some other vector?

@swyx The fact that most don’t even know or realise how open the data is from most LLMs.

Probably has the most eyes on this stuff right now after Pewdiepie released Odysseus.

@swyx Imagine the attendance, it would become the place to be

@swyx the incentive shift is wild when you can just... leave and 10x your comp

@swyx California's non-competes proving to be the real knowledge graph backbone, not just paper trails. 💡

Security teams call this "walk-away risk." You can audit code access, watermark weights, lock down repos. You cannot audit what someone learned to think. AI broke the assumption that valuable IP lives in artifacts — the real alpha walks out the door in someone's head every evening.

@swyx The real shift wasn’t just money. It was realizing the “lab” was often just a slow distribution channel for ideas that already had market value.

@swyx Exactly this. The shift from academic priority to private capture accelerated once the funding arbitrage hit — why publish a paper when a series A values your IP at 9 figures before peer review?

@swyx publishing has negative NPV for senior authors now. every paper is a credible commitment that caps your future exit price. lateral spread up, vertical (down generations) gone. that's the actual loss.

Products are the new papers. The knowledge transfer mechanism shifted — not arxiv, but the GitHub repo on launch day, the talk at a product conference, the blog post with actual numbers.

The gap between what the best practitioners know and what's been published has never been wider. Which is exactly why the @aidotengineer conference idea makes sense.

@swyx Tacit knowledge is leaving the paper layer and getting priced directly by teams that need the work now.

@swyx Classic talent drain, basically just glorified brain drain VC checks at this point.

@swyx sounds about right nobody wants to battle with marketing when theres easy money waiting outside that shift changes everything for research and innovation

@swyx the paper was always a press release for the 4 engineers who wrote section 3.2. now they're 2 startups and a consulting firm before peer review closes.

@swyx the tacit knowledge thing is cope tbh — these labs mostly published benchmarks that look good but break when you put real users on them. they didnt quit bc they had alpha, they qui

@swyx the paper was always a cv.

@swyx the cost is brutal though. papers die because tacit knowledge is worth more private.

but when that knowledge is all in private repos, everyone outside has to rebuild.

researchers get rich. the field stalls.

@swyx walking out with the tacit knowledge is basically the new grad school exit strategy at this point

doesnt even feel like leakage anymore, feels like the model working as intended

@swyx the tacit knowledge exit is the real playbook now

nobody fights legal battles when the check clears in 12 months