This is not the first time I see "(not our best model due to commercial issues)" in a model release. Am I right thinking the the fully trained model may have been sponsored by a provate entity and it's being kept for a commercial release?
The logic never holds up. “Ah yes, if we release our best model, then maybe someone will come build an entire business around it and out-compete us.”
OpenAI started the trend by refusing to release GPT-3. But GPT-3 makes millions, so at least they can say “hey, that’d be like giving away X million.”
It’s all so tiring and depressing. I usually have something positive to say, but my original hypothesis of “npm for ML” seems like a decade away. The culture here is starting to look alarmingly like closed-source gamedev rather than open-source unix.
“How could we possibly justify releasing our code? We wrote it. We paid N developers $X, so that would be like giving away $Y. Plus someone might take the code and build a business and out compete us…”
But I’ll never have that mindset. Subreddit simulator was the only model I never released, and it was because I forgot to check with the creator whether he’d be cool with releasing the model after I trained it. He had different concerns, but I can’t remember them clearly so I don’t want to paraphrase. But I clearly remember they were bogus in exactly the same way, just a different domain (cultural vs commercial).
But hey, at least they released “not our best model.” That’s something. It is indeed better than “no model at all.”
On the other hand, it took the software industry a long time to go from the early days of mainframe programming to the wonder of apt-get. Perhaps we're being a bit impatient.