Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

So they paid developers 300 x 246 = about 73K just for developer recruitment for the study, which is not in any academic journal, or has no peer reviews? The underlying paper looks quite polished and not overtly AI generated so I don't want to say it entirely made up, but how were they even able to get funding for this?

https://metr.org/about Seems like they get paid by AI companies, and they also get government funding.

Our largest funding was through The Audacious Project -- you can see an announcement here: https://metr.org/blog/2024-10-09-new-support-through-the-aud...

Per our website, “To date, April 2025, we have not accepted compensation from AI companies for the evaluations we have conducted.” You can check out the footnote on this page: https://metr.org/donate

Companies produce whitepapers all the time, right? They are typically some combination of technical report, policy suggestion, and advertisement for the organization.

Most of the world provides funding for research, the US used to provide funding but now that has been mostly gutted.

This is really disingenuous when you also say that OpenAI and Anthropic have provided you with access and compute credits (on https://metr.org/about).

Not all payment is cash. Compute credits is still by all means compensation.

>which is not in any academic journal, or has no peer reviews?

As a philosopher who is into epistemology and ontology, I find this to be as abhorrent as religion.

'Science' doesn't matter who publishes it. Science needs to be replicated.

The psychology replication crisis is a prime example of why peer reviews and publishing in a journal matters 0.

Are you willing to be compensated with compute credits for your job?

Such companies spit out "credits" all over the place in order to gain traction and enstablish themselves. I remember when cloud providers gave vps credits to startups like they were peanuts. To me, it really means absolutelly nothing.

I wouldn't do my job for $10, but if somehow someone did pay me $10 to do something, i wouldn't claim i wasn't compensated.

In-kind compensation is still compensation.

> Are you willing to be compensated with compute credits for your job?

Well, yes? I use compute for some personal projects so I would be absolutely fine if a part of my compensation was in compute credits.

As a company, even more so.

Is it "really" disingenuous, or is it just a misinterpretation of what it means to be "compensated for"? Seems more like quibbling to me.

> The psychology replication crisis is a prime example of why peer reviews and publishing in a journal matters 0.

Specifically, it works as an example of a specific case where peer review doesn’t help as much. Peer review checks your arguments, not your data collection process (which the reviewer can’t audit for obvious reasons). It works fine in other scenarios.

Peer review is unrelated to replication problems, except to the extent to which confused people expect peer review to fix totally unrelated replication problems.

Those are compute credits that are directly spent on the experiment itself. It's no more "compensation" than a chemistry researcher being "compensated" with test tubes.

I was actually being kind by saying it's disingenuous. I think it's an outright lie.

> Those are compute credits that are directly spent on the experiment itself.

You're extrapolating, it's not saying this anywhere.

> It's no more "compensation" than a chemistry researcher being "compensated" with test tubes.

Yes, that's compensation too. Thanks for contributing another example. Here's another one: it's no more compensation than a software engineer being compensated with a new computer.

Actually the situation here is way worse than your example. Unless the chemistry researcher is commissioned by Big Test Tube Corp. to conduct research on the outcome of using their test tubes, there's no conflict of interest here. But there is an obvious conflict of interest on AI research being financed by credits given by AI companies to use their own AI tools.

Peer reviews are very important to filter out obviously low effort stuff.

...Or should I say "were" very important? With the help of today's GenAI every low effort stuff can look high effort without much extra effort.

While it would be an ethical concern if they _hadn't_ disclosed it, it's not compensation; it was used _as part of the study_.