These folks are MIT, so citations are valuable to them. Citations convert into prestige, academic career progression, or a favorable exit from academia into industry.

Also, I don't see why you couldn't patent this if you wanted to monetize it.

Yes there is. Lots of researchers are more interested in making a contribution to societal flourishing than in making incredible sums of money. That’s why there’s still lots of top AI researchers in academia.

I do sometimes wonder -- if the transformers paper wasn't published, what would the industry be like? Would the same ideas have been put together in almost the same way weeks or months later somewhere else?

I would say yes.

The reality is that the money being thrown = the time of humans. I guess compute as well, but in terms of people doing innovation - openly published things are the same thing, minus the money.

I know the frontier “labs” are holding back publications.

I don’t think it will last among researchers who think beyond production LLMs

The inventor's grace period under first to file changes still gives them/their university a year to file if they publish openly.