Preprints are just a way to sacrifice rigor for accessibility and velocity. You can throw out "here, this is what I'm working on, here are the quick and dirty findings" really fast and with little friction.

This does skip the academic "checks and balances" like journal selection and peer review - but it can also help anyone else who's working on the adjacent topics.

If a field is moving fast, and you think there can be some value in your work for others in the near term? Preprint. If your work is too incomplete or too minor to warrant trying to polish and publish it, but you don't want to table it? Preprint. Too deep in corporate structures to care about academic "street cred", and want your work to be accessible? Preprint. Have an exciting early finding that you want to push out there, and are willing to take the rep risks of being wrong about it? Preprint.

There's a reason why preprints came to be the lifeblood of ML.

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VBprogrammer an hour ago | parent [-]

Academia isn't my thing but I also wonder if there isn't an aspect of putting a stake in the ground? So that if someone beats you to publishing you at least have some record of being on that track.

	▲	gmueckl 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That is definitely a big motivator for publishing preprints. Journal submissions can take up to a year. Comference submissions take months. If the field is moving fast, claiming a finding early can become an important career move. In older days, academics would just share notes on their work and word wouldn't usually spread widely before publication. Preprints may be the better model. But public visibility means that non-experts now get to see the good and the bad research equally, but they won't have the domain knowledge and skill to distinguish one from the other with confidence.