Expert takes Aug 23, 2026

This week · posted August 15

A standard-bearer for open research says the published literature has stopped surprising her. And we decided today not to elevate it into a judgment.

Sara Hooker formerly led Cohere For AI — the non-profit research lab inside the model company Cohere, long associated with open-weight models and cross-lingual work — and has stood on the open-research side for years. She writes that she used to spend every Saturday reading papers and now forces herself through the ones already bookmarked, and she splits the reason in two: frontier work is no longer published, and "progress is narrowing so most papers echo each other in boring ways" (@sarahookr, 08-15). A minute later she asked her own followers for counter-examples: "What was the last genuinely surprising paper you read?" (the follow-up) We took it because a sentence like that carries different weight coming from someone whose own side it cuts against: from the standard-bearer of open research it lands far harder than from anyone inside a closed lab. The two reasons are two different diseases, and reading them together breaks them: one is work leaving the public channel, the other is homogenisation among the work still being published. Merge them into a single sentence and two separately refutable claims become one impression nobody can refute.