[roenxi]

> It’s like saying ”where would we be with AI if Google, OpenAI and Nvidia didn’t have an iron grip”.

We'd be where we are. All the codec-equivalent aspects of their work are unencumbered by patents and there are very high quality free models available in the market that are just given away. If the multimedia world had followed the Google example it'd be quite hard to complain about the codecs.

[thinkingQueen]

That’s hardly true. Nvidia’s tech is covered by patents and licenses. Why else would it be worth 4.5 trillion dollars?

The top AI companies use very restrictive licenses.

I think it’s actually the other way around and AI industry will actually end up following the video coding industry when it comes to patents, royalties, licenses etc.

[roenxi]

Because they make and sell a lot of hardware. I'm sure they do have a lot of patents and licences, but if all that disappeared today it'd be years to decades before anyone could compete with them. Even just getting a foot in the door in TSMC's queue of customers would be hard. Their valuation can likely be justified based on their manufacturing position alone. There is literally no-one else who can do what they do, law or otherwise.

If it is a matter of laws, China would just declare the law doesn't count to dodge around the US chip sanctions. Which, admittedly, might happen - but I don't see how that could result in much more freedom than we already have now. Having more Chinese people involved is generally good for prices, but that doesn't have much to do with market structure as much as they work hard and do things at scale.

> The top AI companies use very restrictive licenses.

These models are supported by the Apache 2.0 license ~ https://openai.com/open-models/

Are they lying to me? It is hard to get much more permissive than Apache 2.

[mike_hearn]

The top AI companies don't release their best models under any license. They're not even distributed at all. If you did steal the weights out from underneath Anthropic they would take you to court and probably win. Putting software you develop exclusively behind a network interface is a form of ultra-restrictive DRM. Yes, some places are currently trying to buy mindshare by releasing free models and that's fantastic, thank you, but they can only do that because investors believe the ROI from proprietary firewalled models will more than fund it.

NVIDIA's advantage over AMD is largely in the drivers and CUDA i.e. their software. If it weren't for IP law or if NVIDIA had foolishly made their software fully open source, AMD could have just forked their PTX compiler and NVIDIAs advantage would never have been established. In turn that'd have meant they wouldn't have any special privileges at TSMC.

[oblio]

I imagine a chunk of it is also covered by trade secrets and NDAs.