[dontreact]

To deploy generative AI in healthcare someone has to pay for the salaries of a lot of people to do the work. That means there needs to be a business model.

I am not sure who will take an AI through regulatory procedures if it is open source and there is no way to make money from it.

Open source is a useful tool for research yes. More of it would be nice.

But I don’t understand how or why anyone is going to go through all the hurdles of deploying technology if all of it is open source.

Maybe an open source enthusiast can explain to me how that is supposed to work?

[lrvick]

Redhat, Element, Prusa, Adafruit, Sidero Labs, Arduino... plenty of companies that open source everything or almost everything and have have staying power.

Many consumers, myself included, will -only- pay for technology if it is open source. In fact if something is proprietary I feel I am being cheated anyway and I might as well pirate it until I find something open to support.

Many of us are willing to pay for time and labor and to support development for our personal projects and businesses so long as we have the power to change that relationship later and keep the tech if third party company later goes evil or goes under.

If I do not have the source code, I do not own it. If I cannot own it, then why pay for it.

Also everything becomes open source eventually. Companies can choose to accelerate this and earn community goodwill that might make them money selling open source turn-key services, or be replaced by that same community eventually doing it all themselves.

No one pays for a license fee for the Linux kernel, but they pay their choice of cloud provider to host it. Choice. That is what I will pay for.

https://staltz.com/time-till-open-source-alternative.html

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

[dontreact]

I looked through a bit of the companies here and I don’t see any companies that have to retain a quality system and staff to stand behind their products permanently. These models seem to work better when you can just put stuff out there and occasionally pop in to help?

This is not a model that can work with regulated medical products. There is a very significant cost to maintaining static artifacts and I don’t see how you can defensively do that if anyone can access the artifacts?

[lrvick]

You must have overlooked RedHat and Sidero Labs.

How many hospitals download the linux kernel and manage their own servers?

I would assume very few. They likely lack the expertise, and pay third party companies to manage the servers, patches, and updates for them... even when the software is open source.

[dontreact]

If installing these things required passing FDA trials before you could even do the first install, it’s hard to imagine anyone self funding the regulatory trial and then open sourcing the result.

These businesses you mention are different because you can start getting paid as soon as you build some expertise in how to operationalize the systems.

[robwwilliams]

In progress—-this is a natural for a joint effort by NIH, VA, NSF, DOE, DoD, companies, many universities across the globe.

Not just biomedical research but all of science. The effort is being managed out of Argonne National Laboratory by Rick Stevens.

https://www.anl.gov/article/new-international-consortium-for...

[dontreact]

Open source is a good model for science but how will this lead to regulated medical products?

[nradov]

Only certain classes of healthcare products require regulatory approval. For example, you could likely build and distribute an open source AI tool for summarizing patient charts, and the FDA probably wouldn't object (this is not legal advice).

[dontreact]

Yes there is an unregulated layer but I think it’s clear the FDA will certainly care about the most impactful applications of AI in healthcare