Response to Harvard Professor Alan Aspuru-Guzik comment here.
Dear Professor Aspuru-Guzik,
0. Thank you again for repeating your intention to answer me one day.
The criticism about molecular diversity that Mostapha is harping on will be addressed by us and others in a timely fashion, with proper metrics in further revisions of our preprint/paper or in new publications.
I don’t have Derek Lowe 's patience. If you let me wait more than a year, as you did with him, I won’t probably care about your answer anymore. I am moving on.
As you see, I am impatient myself, and I totally agree that it’s better to post a half-baked paper quickly, instead of waiting for a polished piece. I hope my comments help you slowly improving your piece. I am also convinced about the value of making noise, and shouting that your piece is half-baked:
we are open about the limitations of the first generations of our GAN model.
This can encourage impatient people to finish the job quicker.
2. Please forgive my impatience, but it was not only about my whims:
I also had some little compassion for all the people who suffer from cancer, and who are even more impatient than me to find those magic AI-molecules.
They also can’t expect that President Trump will increase US research funding. Such funding could have allowed Harvard to hire more staff and, maybe, tackle my question faster, without you needing to drop whatever you are doing. I fully understand the financial hardships of your tiny lab.
In this cold financial climate for academia, I preferred to avoid competing against your reputable lab for a precious NSF or NIH grant. Instead, I tried to leverage the reputation of your lab, in order to send a reliable signal to private investors. They have tons of cash to burn to solve those life-critical problems (and I quickly understood that A16Z was not gonna be a good fit). After all, maybe they will invest in a scalable project like Startcrowd, instead of donating to Harvard or Stanford (btw, Startcrowd accepts crypto-investments, see this post about blockchain). Your answers, and absence of answers, are revealing that academia is ready for disruption more than ever.
While always respecting civility, I still love keeping an entertaining tone. It’s not only about my character, it’s also a commercial strategy: academic papers are boring for most of us. In any case, I think that my post remains more civil than the typical anonymous referee report, coming out from the peer-review channels, which you seem so happy to deal with:
When Mostapha contacted us several months ago and having read his preprint, decided not to engage with him directly but rather through the proper peer-review channels.
To keep this atmosphere of civility, cherished by all, I suggest you to be careful with name-calling, like your use of the term commercial researcher:
It has not been our full priority, e.g. drop whatever we are doing to satisfy the whims of a commercial researcher.
Personally, I don’t see any substantial difference between ‘commercial’ and ‘academic’ researchers. What about you, did you imply that one category was better than the other, in some way? If you think academic researchers are better, just tell why to the PhD comics, it will inspire them a good joke.
I am also sure that researchers in the machine learning industry (at Google, Facebook…) will appreciate the label ‘commercial researchers’.
Anyway, I will never be offended by the ‘commercial’ label. If anything, it means I am trying hard to figure out a sustainable business model, for doing science, even in counter-intuitive ways (like this ‘anti-hype’ consulting service from Startcrowd, which is unique in the world, and I believe its potential is huge).
By the way, I think that building a business is generally better than asking people for charity, as you are doing on this donation platform:
I won’t call you a charity researcher, but why not keeping charity for people who can’t have a business model ?
Trust me, our world is full of commercial opportunities, in Kendall Square and beyond. For example, if you hate Trump, just cross the Atlantic, and try to do green-tech business with Macron. Or go North, and try with Justin. If you simply hate all governments, try crypto-anarchism, and launch an ICO on the blockchain. Try something, and anyway, don’t name-call those who try.
3. Finally, I am sorry if your ivory tower is not sound-proof yet, but you are not in the right position to complain about noise:
blog posts such as Mostapha’s just add noise instead of actually relevant information.
Your ORGAN paper on Arxiv is quite noisy too: why throwing all those numbers, metrics and tables, if at the end, you don’t use them at all in your conclusion? It just adds noise ;)
