Given how absolutely pitiful the proprietary advancements in AI have been, I would posit we have little to worry about.

OTOH the companies who are sharing their breakthroughs openly aren't yet making any money, so something has to give. The research is currently being bankrolled by investors who assume there will be returns eventually, and eventually can only be kicked down the road for so long.

Eventually can be (and has been) bankrolled by Nvidia. They did a lot of ground-floor research on GANs and training optimization, which only makes sense to release as public research. Similarly, Meta and Google are both well-incentivized to share their research through Pytorch and Tensorflow respectively.

I really am not expecting Apple or Microsoft to discover AGI and ferret it away for profitability purposes. Strictly speaking, I don't think superhuman intelligence even exists in the domain of text generation.

Well, that's because the potential reward from picking the right horse is MASSIVE and the cost of potentially missing out is lifelong regret. Investors are driven by FOMO more than anything else. They know most of these will be duds but one of these duds could turn out to be life changing. So they will keep bankrolling as long as they have the money.

Sort of yes, sort of no.

Of course, I agree that Stability AI made Stable Diffusion freely available and they're worth orders of magnitude less than OpenAI. To the point they're struggling to keep the lights on.

But it doesn't necessarily make that much difference whether you openly share the inner technical details. When you've got a motivated and well financed competitor, merely demonstrating a given feature is possible, showing the output and performance and price, might be enough.

If OpenAI adds a feature, who's to say Google and Facebook can't match it even though they can't access the code?

Anthropic has been very secretive about the supposed synthetic data they used to train 3.5 Sonnet.

Given how good the model is terms of the quality vs speed tradeoff, they must have something.

>Attention Is All You Need paper detailing transformers, and it would be an entirely different market if Google had held that as a trade secret.

I would guess that in that timeline, Google would never have been able to learn about the incredible capabilities of transformer models outside of translation, at least not until much later.