What is the business behind publishing AI models?

[john1203]

Fine-tuning models requires substantial effort, not only in terms of knowledge but also in terms of financial costs and time. What is the advantage of publishing the results “free of charge” in public repositories?

[re-thc]

Get testers to collect feedback without paying for hosting costs. To kill off competition with closed off models that are behind services.

Some countries have rather specific reasons e.g. China. Most high end AI tooling e.g. Nvidia GPUs are "banned" or capped. They're low on capacity. So they train their models with Nvidia GPUs outside of their country (i.e. avoid import ban), publish the model and then fine tune it back home for their market.