Very few people realize that most of the successful AI startups got successful because they were focused on open science and open-source for at least their first few years. To name but a few, OpenAI (GPT, GPT2 was open-source), Runway & Stability (stable diffusion), Cohere, Mistral and of course Hugging Face!
The reasons are not just altruistic, it's also because sharing your science and your models pushes you to build AI faster (which is key in a fast-moving domain like AI), attracts the best scientists & engineers and generates much more visibility, usage and community contributions than if you were 100% closed-source. The same applies to big tech companies as we're seeing with Meta and Google!
More startups and companies should release research & open-source AI, it's not just good for the world but also increases their probability of success!
