[danShumway]

> and sells it

If that was true that would be a profoundly bad purchase for NVidia since the data is already freely licensed and available for anyone to use at no cost.

This is like saying that Epic "bought" Blender when they gave it a development grant, or that Google contributing patches to upstream Linux means they own it now. Mozilla didn't give NVidia any kind of special license, when NVidia contributes data to Common Voice they're doing so under Common Voice's license, not their own.

We want to encourage more companies to treat software and training data as a public commons that is collectively maintained, this is a good thing.

[rasz]

Its the kind of "bad" Nvidia purchase like when they pay game publishers for incorporation of physx/cuda/hairworks/gameworks resulting in

https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assass...

https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-to...

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-game...

Here it appears they purchased this https://venturebeat.com/2021/04/12/mozilla-winds-down-deepsp...

[danShumway]

This is silly. Common Voice is not adding NVidia-specific features; what would that even look like for a database? There is no comparison to be made between donating resources to an openly licensed database and encouraging developers to optimize their games for proprietary APIs.

And the assumption the shutting down Deep Speech was specifically for NVidia's benefit seems like a fairly large leap to me, given that Deep Speech is already mature, still being developed under Coqui.ai, and surrounded by a wide diversity of other deep learning projects that also aren't controlled by NVidia.

Decreasing barriers of entry for those models and providing raw data is probably the right thing for Mozilla to be focusing on right now. Any team can build a language model, only companies like Mozilla can coordinate mass data collection for those models.