[m0zg]

I was taken aback by this one as well. Basically this is an ineffectual attempt at preventing giving away their AI advantage by letting others use their proprietary models (and thus, indirectly, the gigantic dataset that make those models so good) as a "teacher" for their own models, using the fairly standard model refinement techniques popularized by their own Geoff Hinton. Keeping the cards close to their vest, as it were.

See e.g. https://www.quora.com/What-is-hiybbprqag for an example where Microsoft trained their ranker on Google's long tail and substantially reduced the relevance gap on the cheap, and in a way that makes it impossible for Google to trivially regain the advantage. People misinterpreted this as "Microsoft is copying the results", but that's not what it was. Google was unwillingly teaching Bing how to rank. Google responded with personalized search.

I don't think they can realistically prevent this, though. And it's not going to be anywhere near as traceable as "hiybbprqag" was.