[wrsh07]

To be clear: I agree that opening up model + weights makes it possible for third parties to distill or fine tune

If you look at the frenzy of activity that happened after midjourney became accessible, that was awesome for everyone. Midjourney probably got help running their model efficiently and a ton of progress was quickly made.

I'm pretty sympathetic to a company doing a windowing strategy: prepare the API as a sort of beta release timed with the announcement. Spend some time cleaning up the code for public release (at Google this means ripping out internal dependencies that aren't open source), and then release a reference inference implementation along with the weights.

That's pretty reasonable. I wanted to push back on this idea that "the reason Google isn't dropping model + weights is because the corporate screws are coming down hard"

Google isn't waiting to release the weights so that they can profit from this. It's essentially the first step in the process, and serving via API gives them valuable usage data they they might not get if/when it's open sourced

[jryb]

I take most of your points except the last one. The feedback would come in the form of publications, definitely from academia and to a lesser degree industry (admittedly a slow iteration time). Also just public discourse - there was no dearth of very specific, highly technical feedback for any of the releases of alphafold on twitter, for example.

But I can’t use this at all at work (a pharma company) because it would leak confidential information. So anything they learn from usage data is systematically excluding (the vast majority of?) people working on therapeutics.

[wrsh07]

If it's worth using for you in your work, it might be worth your employer striking a deal about data confidentiality so you can use it.

But you couldn't use it for work anyway because usage is non commercial. So you need to pay them to change the license anyway.

[diggan]

> serving via API gives them valuable usage data

It might give them a bit, but AFAIK most institutions (especially non-American ones) aren't exactly overly happy about using closed American APIs in order to do science, especially not because API usage isn't reproducible.

Sure, they might be able to play around with some toy data, but for Google to actually get valuable usage data, then they need to let people actually use the thing for real things, and then you cannot gate it behind a API, it isn't feasible in a real-world environment.