This post puts forward two paths:
1) Everyone and everything is subsumed into the forest. Innovation becomes unprofitable for the innovator as the one who controls the forest uses their capital to clone every new innovation.
2) Everyone withdraws from the forest. Innovation goes private. The forest stops growing, but doesn't die.
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But there's two things the post doesn't consider:
1) Viral licensing.
What happens to a model if it is trained on data that comes with a license? What happens if the laws that be decide that the model producers, the models and the products of the models themselves must follow the conditions of the licences. How will that affect the model producers? What if customers don't want to be beholden to those licenses? What happens if the conventional wisdom is to avoid models to avoid lawsuits? What happens when models, model producers and customers power lawsuits against (other) model producers? Where would the new equilibrium between model producers and innovators move to?
2) Non-profits models
What happens to model producers if customer shift to become non-profits themselves, specifically those that pay employees instead of model producers. Would the model producers become starved out? Or would they need to switch to non-profit status as well? How would model producers, the models and the forest as a whole change if profit no longer became the priority?
As the first line of the post says - it's a thought experiment, so comments like yours that open new options and ask new questions are the best outcome.
I have no other comment other than - very interesting. I thought about how the overlying model will change for us, but haven't considered that the underlying model (what you proposed) can change too ... if that makes sense.
what about we properly implement copyright and protection for software to prevent cloning style theft?
I mean we haven't had an innovation in patents and trademark for software for how long? Why is it that only hardware can be copyrighted and trademarked - can we really find no way to do this that can't be abused by patent trolls?
I asked recently on social media if anyone knows if there has been a legal decision regarding if GPL source code that was used for training an LLM will taint all that LLMs output with the same GPL licence. So far nothing has come up but I think people are wanting to know the answers.
It has been said that Microsoft indemnifies people using its LLM tools against copyright and patent issues, but I don't know if it applies to LLM output which might/should be GPL licenced.