What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how?
Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves?
I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders?
Or there is a commercial logic that motivates sharing of information and intellectual property? What logic is that?
My understanding is that frontier researchers will work for companies that will let them publish papers and discuss them with their peers.
When you're an engineer at the tier of these AI researchers, winning an extra 100k/year on top of you current 500k (numbers out of my ass) is not worth it vs getting name recognition. Being known as one of the authors that made the transformer for example will enable you work with other bright minded individuals and create even better things.
So essentially these commercial companies have "we'll let you publish papers when you work for us" as a perk.
> When you're an engineer at the tier of these AI researchers, winning an extra 100k/year on top of you current 500k (numbers out of my ass) is not worth it vs getting name recognition. Being known as one of the authors that made the transformer for example will enable you work with other bright minded individuals and create even better things.
Also, instead of an extra 100k a year, you get to raise a billion dollars in VC funds for your next company
1. Goodwill and mindshare. If you're known as "the best" or "the most innovative", then you'll attract customers.
2. Talent acquisition. Smart people like working with smart people.
3. Becoming the standard. If your technology becomes widely adopted, and you've been using it the longest, then you're suddenly be the best placed in your industry to make use of the technology while everyone retools.
4. Deception. Sometimes you publish work that's "old" internally but is still state of the art. This provides your competition with a false sense of where your research actually is.
5. Freeride on others' work. Maybe experimenting with extending an idea is too expensive/risky to fund internally? Perhaps a wave of startups will try. Acquire one of them that actually makes it work.
6. Undercut the market leader. If your industry has a clear market leader, the others can use open source to cooperate to erode that leadership position.
> Or there is a commercial logic that motivates sharing of information and intellectual property? What logic is that?
There absolutely is a sound commercial justification to share research: long-term growth through advancement of the field. (Deep learning would never have made the progress it has without open research!)
If this seems quaint, it’s because we’re too accustomed to short-term, transactional, Wall Street thinking.
It's not so much that it seems quaint, it's that we are accustomed to short-term, transactional, Wall Street thinking from companies like Google.
For very good reason, because that's exactly how they behave in all other areas. The question remains, why do they appear altruistic when it comes to sharing papers?
I find it hard to believe that it's actual altruism. It's far more likely that it's transactional behavior that just appears altruistic from the outside.
> it's that we are accustomed to short-term, transactional, Wall Street thinking from companies like Google.
Out of all of the companies in the world, I wouldn't put Google near the bottom of the list in terms of stuff they've discovered and released to the world.
It's such a rapidly developing field with much of the progress happening in small labs on the open source models. Eventually, the field will coverage and stabilize. For now, the bet is too be open and supportive, to be close to the progress and be in best position when the dust settles.
People may be altruistic, but in a company setting they may have no possibility for altruism. CEO decisions influence property of others (the shareholders) so he can not freely pursue altruistic goals.
These days the courts give wide latitude to companies to offer virtually any plausible reason why superficially altruistic acts are in fact good long term for shareholder value. Anyone wanting to do what Ford did just needs to keep their mouth shut about the real reasons.
The ACL, NeurIPS, ICLR and the rest of AI professional organizations are why this happens. Forced open sourcing of everything. No pay to access. It’s the ideal open academic environment for rapid innovation. We must jealously defend our current system, as it will soon come under attack by those who get angry about democratization of the means of computation.
Also, lots of copyright abolitionists in AI. Many people who work in the space delight in the idea of making information, especially their own, free.
The ghost of Aaron Swartz runs through every researcher in this space.
Indeed, is there a chance Google did not evaluate properly what the transformer will eventually be used for/become. It was created for translation as an improvement on seq2seq, right? Which was for translation, not for thinking, and to a certain extent... still is about translation, and are not other emergent capabilities actually a side-effect, only observed later when parameter size grew?
He is just one person. He happens to be the most famous scientist working on this field at the moment it became a gold rush, but it's work built on the shoulders of those who came before, whose discoveries are just as important.
This may be related to Google's business model. Google's main businesses - search engine and advertising - both rely on an open web ecosystem. Therefore, Google has long maintained a friendly attitude toward open source and the open web, such as with Chromium, Noto fonts, Go, Flutter, and others. By providing infrastructure tools that benefit the open web, Google extends the reach of its searchable content and advertising. When the entire Web ecosystem benefits, Google ultimately benefits as well. This model also aligns with the philosophy of the open source community, where everyone is a beneficiary and naturally becomes a contributor.
All of the major labs have one thing in common: they have nearly unlimited data and money, but what they don’t have unlimited is talent and ideas. It’s just a way of progressing without having to „hire every idea“.
Well Deepseek's survival also depends on the giant amount of hype they can generate, and they won't get more investor money just by having done a one-hit wonder. Becoming deeply integrated in the AI ecosystem with various tools and innovative discoveries will most like be more beneficial than protecting the secrets of their first success.
Just as the company's name DEEPSEEK, it's commercial company and invest their based on AI, but the company's founder has more targets which are more common for human. Money is number for them, they want to do more, especially for DEEPSEEK.
If google never published it (and we pretend like it would not have leaked) then we would never have the LLM:s we have today (including Googles). Everyone would loose.
Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves?
I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders?
Or there is a commercial logic that motivates sharing of information and intellectual property? What logic is that?