I mean, I get your point but you're making me more and more disagreeing with it, hah. Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, but I'll entertain the response.

Let's start with the fact that payroll and subscription tier can't be "giving back". That's just running a business. Whisper was a fig leaf when it was an open-everything era. Where are frontier weights now? Anthropic's papers describe how they did it, not who they did it to. That methods section isn't a royalty check for millions of people whose work is baked into those weights.

"Too hard to compensate fairly" is demonstrably false. If ASCAP figured out fractional royalties with paper ledgers, so can high tech. It's not _hard_, it's expensive which is _the actual reason_, but it's dressed up as logistics.

"Lizardbrain jealousy" bit is reducing critique to tribal envy and that's a move in the debate when your on the positive side of the curve and you'd prefer the conversation to end there. It's stupid, come on.

What I wanted to contrast it with is the non-capitalist version you kind of waived off. Publicly funded research, open initiatives, public private partnerships.. that's literally how we got transistor, the internet, GPS, mRNA, hell even math underneath the transformer. Capitalist layer didn't invent any of that, it wrapped subscription around it. The actual productive parts of the stack came from exactly the model you're mocking. OTOH, credit where it's due for Google's research arm that actually contributed back at the foundational level. An exception to the rule, if anything.