[godelski]

> Open source is a great philosophy

So I guess I should be clear, I'm thinking source available. I know Open Source is a loaded word.

But doesn't this kinda support my thinking? They accelerated by using the open tools and then slowed once they had a more mature product? I mean we've seen huge advancements in LLaMA and StableDiffusion because of their open source-ness. One could argue that GPT is also getting major benefits from this, but I think also partially because it's the most common LLM to perform analysis on (which is a bit weird that researchers do this on a closed source/data model...)

I definitely get the argument around your competitor being able to snag your work, but if we're talking about source available then that becomes a legal matter. And truth be told, we could say the same about a lot of hardware. I mean anything hardware you can visibly inspect.

I definitely don't know how that all plays out in literal numbers and I do wonder if there is some counterfactual data out there. I'm just highly suspicious that it isn't as big of a cost as many assume it is. Even software you can do a really good job at cloning if you have access to it (even if completely black box). There's definitely costs, my question is just how much this compares to benefits. And is source available cost being confused with first mover cost? Because that has the same implication as you note in your conclusion.