Anthropic and OpenAI have proven themselves to be aspiring monopolists through their positions and actions. Why would you want to share your research with them?
That's not really a common attitude in academia, unfortunately.
The most common attitude is something closer to "I want to be well known and respected by smart and influential people". In short, prestige.
People using your work is a side effect of success, but simultaneously threatens your ownership of your "brand". If they significantly improve upon the thing you did, your work could be made irrelevant, your prestige ruined.
If you want people to copy it, but want a 20 year temporary monopoly, you can publish an open source step-by-step guide for someone to recreate what you’re doing with the patent office.
Unfortunately, there is an incentive to make the patent application contain just enough detail that a patent clerk with relatively little knowledge of the subject will grant a patent, but not enough detail that an expert would be able to follow to get the same result in practice.
Also 20 years is a crazy long time in some industries (like most software).
The downside is frontier computer science in several domains is decades beyond the state-of-the-art from academic literature. This is the situation that patents were designed to disincentivize.
There is not an obvious path to making this research public again. That's the reality. For open source to be competitive it needs to be approximately as efficient as the best systems we design.
Listing on stock exchange of ai product requires open sourcing parts or all of your publicly trained stack.
Double or triple taxes on companies that do not provide for public good.
Will this happen, probably when the market crashes and people want companies and individuals to pay. Really matters if it’s a 2008 crash or a 1929 crash where the bankers and stock brokers were jumping out of upper stories.
Do you want companies to have incentives to pay researchers even if NDAs and non competes are basically unenforceable? Do you want any communication of knowledge from corporations? Should companies not be allowed to benefit from sometimes huge investments in research?
> Do you want companies to have incentives to pay researchers even if NDAs and non competes are basically unenforceable?
I thought "recursive self improvement" would bring an effective abundance for everybody, any minute now, Musk said so himself. Seems the researchers in the field are lying to us about it while they clutch their pearls and dream about other people's money as if the future is a dog-eats-dog world of death-inducing scarcity.
They shouldn't be lying like that, or at least, their lying shouldn't be so obvious.
No one in the field itself takes Musk seriously, or sees him as part of it. I think he's a Nazi and an idiot. You're weird if you trust what the leader of DOGE, sig heiler and maker of the cyber truck says about anything scientific.
Recursive self improvement is a blue skies longer term thing. No one technical is saying that it's live right now.
If your perception of a moat is worth more than the GDP of most countries, publishing anything must seem like a bad idea. Much less helping others build upon your work.
Arguably, the point of a startup isn’t to make money, it’s to attract attention and then investors.
Once the business is making money it’s not really a startup any more, it’s a going concern.
OP is an undergrad student. Attracting attention is what will make them stand out. And sharing research at this stage will probably expose them to research others don’t want to publish but do want to share with other researchers.
I'm saying that there's no difference between doing it for money and doing it for the attention of investors, because investors are also money.
OP's startup is publishing because they think there's an economic advantage to doing so. That's not good or bad; it just is.
Very, very few things in the tech world are done "just because". Even fewer things when we're talking about AI being developed in the US. For better or for worse, the leadership in that segment of our field has established profit motive as their god.
To rephrase it more bluntly: the difference between normal business and a modern startup is that between a cow bred for milking vs. a pig bred for slaughter.
There seems to be this mentality among a large number of people who publish open data/research/software that everything is fine as long as no one else makes money using it. The second that happens, they're furious and act as though someone unfairly profited off of their "unpaid labor" (read: that thing they did purely for the love of the game). I think it has to be some sort of feeling of resentment and/or stupidity that _they_ were the person with a million dollar idea that let it slip through their fingers.
It's not that difficult. You invest effort into research in the hope it'll give you a competitive edge. If someone else can come along and reproduce your results practically at a much lesser cost, then you lose that competitive edge. You're back at square one, except you've lost the cost of the research.
That the point he is making does not apply to open source, but rather to freeware (which is open source too). Open source can be completely B2B, without releasing it to third parties. Also open source is not free software, so you can also forbid your costumers from sharing the source further.
EDIT: That's crap. I only thought about the aspect of continuing sharing, but if you also don't want your direct customers to know, then of course open source is very much relevant.