Reflections on "API Science" and Its Negative Impact on AI Research
tessera_antra · x · 2026-09-01
Researcher tesseraantra reflected that linguists from the GPT-3 era were right in suggesting that "API science" is detrimental to the field. The argument is that this practice reifies meaningless API affordances as if they were real features of the language model itself, leading to a corruption of research focus and a misunderstanding of what is actually being studied.
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