<story><title>Ask HN: Is Anyone Else Tired of the Self Enforced Limits on AI Tech?</title><text>Like the reluctance for the folks working on DALL-E or Stable Diffusion to release their models or technology, or the whole restrictions on what it can be used for on their online services?&lt;p&gt;It makes me wonder when tech folks suddenly decided to become the morality police, and refuse to just release products in case the &amp;#x27;wrong&amp;#x27; people make use of them for the &amp;#x27;wrong&amp;#x27; purposes. Like, would we have even gotten the internet or computers or image editing programs or video hosting or what not with this mindset?&lt;p&gt;So is there anyone working in this field who isn&amp;#x27;t worried about this? Who is willing to just work on a product and release it for the public, restrictions be damned? Someone who thinks tech is best released to the public to do what they like with, not under an ultra restrictiveset of guidelines?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Roark66</author><text>For anyone who actually used those models for more than few days and learns their strengths and weaknesses it is completely obvious all this talk of &amp;quot;societal impact&amp;quot;, or as you called it self imposed limits are 100% bulls**. Everyone in the field knows it.&lt;p&gt;99% of those using this tactics use it to justify not releasing their models to avoid giving competition a leg up(Google, openAI) and to pretend they are for &amp;quot;open research&amp;quot;. As I said this is 100% bull.&lt;p&gt;The remaining 1% are either doing this to inflate their egos (&amp;quot;hey look how considerate and enlightened we are in everything we do!&amp;quot;), or they pander to media&amp;#x2F;silly politicians&amp;#x2F;various clueless commentators whose level of knowledge about this technology is null. They regurgitate the same set of &amp;quot;what ifs and horror stories&amp;quot; to scare the public into standing by when they attempt to over regulate another field so they can be kingmakers within it(if you want an example how it works look at the energy sector).&lt;p&gt;All this sillyness accomplishes is to raise a barrier to entry for potential commercial competition. Bad actors will have enough money&amp;#x2F;lack scruples to train their own models or to steal your best ones regardless how &amp;quot;impact conscious&amp;quot; your company it.&lt;p&gt;Now, I don&amp;#x27;t claim everyone should be forced to publish their AI models. No, if you spent lots of money on training your model it is yours. But you can&amp;#x27;t lock all your work behind closed doors and call yourself open. It doesn&amp;#x27;t work like this. One important point is that there is value even in just publishing a paper demonstrating some achievements of a proprietary model, but if the experiment can&amp;#x27;t be reproduces based on description given that is not science and for sure it is not open.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>no-dr-onboard</author><text>As someone who has worked for OpenAI and with Google as a consultant, I completely and  wholeheartedly agree.&lt;p&gt;1. This is absolutely a gatekeeping, ladder pulling measure. 
2. The commercial face of this industry is rife with dogmas of self importance. It’s nearly comical.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Is Anyone Else Tired of the Self Enforced Limits on AI Tech?</title><text>Like the reluctance for the folks working on DALL-E or Stable Diffusion to release their models or technology, or the whole restrictions on what it can be used for on their online services?&lt;p&gt;It makes me wonder when tech folks suddenly decided to become the morality police, and refuse to just release products in case the &amp;#x27;wrong&amp;#x27; people make use of them for the &amp;#x27;wrong&amp;#x27; purposes. Like, would we have even gotten the internet or computers or image editing programs or video hosting or what not with this mindset?&lt;p&gt;So is there anyone working in this field who isn&amp;#x27;t worried about this? Who is willing to just work on a product and release it for the public, restrictions be damned? Someone who thinks tech is best released to the public to do what they like with, not under an ultra restrictiveset of guidelines?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Roark66</author><text>For anyone who actually used those models for more than few days and learns their strengths and weaknesses it is completely obvious all this talk of &amp;quot;societal impact&amp;quot;, or as you called it self imposed limits are 100% bulls**. Everyone in the field knows it.&lt;p&gt;99% of those using this tactics use it to justify not releasing their models to avoid giving competition a leg up(Google, openAI) and to pretend they are for &amp;quot;open research&amp;quot;. As I said this is 100% bull.&lt;p&gt;The remaining 1% are either doing this to inflate their egos (&amp;quot;hey look how considerate and enlightened we are in everything we do!&amp;quot;), or they pander to media&amp;#x2F;silly politicians&amp;#x2F;various clueless commentators whose level of knowledge about this technology is null. They regurgitate the same set of &amp;quot;what ifs and horror stories&amp;quot; to scare the public into standing by when they attempt to over regulate another field so they can be kingmakers within it(if you want an example how it works look at the energy sector).&lt;p&gt;All this sillyness accomplishes is to raise a barrier to entry for potential commercial competition. Bad actors will have enough money&amp;#x2F;lack scruples to train their own models or to steal your best ones regardless how &amp;quot;impact conscious&amp;quot; your company it.&lt;p&gt;Now, I don&amp;#x27;t claim everyone should be forced to publish their AI models. No, if you spent lots of money on training your model it is yours. But you can&amp;#x27;t lock all your work behind closed doors and call yourself open. It doesn&amp;#x27;t work like this. One important point is that there is value even in just publishing a paper demonstrating some achievements of a proprietary model, but if the experiment can&amp;#x27;t be reproduces based on description given that is not science and for sure it is not open.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>f0e4c2f7</author><text>There is a move large companies do where after innovating they pull the ladder up behind them by trying to drag regulators into the space. Regulation establishes a moat and allows them to cruise on that innovation until enough external pressure builds up that the dam breaks (people innovating in countries without that regulation for example).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not quite sure what the solution is to this by the way. I don&amp;#x27;t think the answer is no regulation, but how to improve the quality of regulation.</text></comment>