I'm guessing they will then lobby to ban open source AI models, especially their usage in commercial applications. One would need a huge bank account to create models in the future. I think this would have a chilling effect on the AI ecosystem. In essence it's a form of regulatory capture.
You already need a huge bank account to create models, the (quality) open source ones are all hand-me-downs from companies burning through huge stacks of investor cash and giving away the spoils. It should go without saying that that won't last.
I mean it's in the crown sourcing range for diffusion models and going to get cheaper. It currently costs 50k to retrain stable diffusion 2 (https://www.databricks.com/blog/stable-diffusion-2). So yeah, mandatory licensing of data on the open web would absolutely kill university projects and small startups. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say
That's 50k if you already know the exact architecture you're going to use, and the exact training data you're going to use, and nail it all on the first try. Multiply that by however many failed attempts it takes while experimenting with new ideas, especially when the corporate players stop being so eager to publish the finer details of their research, and that 50k could very quickly turn into millions.
Yeah, it's not going to be SOTA but existing models are already good enough for a reasonable portion of use cases. Even if they lag behind it's important to have free models.
