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Comment by yetanotheruser8 | Hacker News Reader

This study was organized by Google (Technically DeepMind).

I wouldn't be surprised if Google is wanting the lawsuit to lose. It would block open-source models like these from existing and give them potentially a competitive advantage to be able to afford whatever compliance is mandated. They'd be able to offer services that comply, but open-source models would only have access to lower quality data and would be stunted.

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I think there's a concern also that smaller companies can gain a competitive edge via resistance to reputational damage. As Yann LeCun recently tweeted:

'By releasing public demos that, as impressive & useful as they may be, have major flaws, established companies have less to gain & more to lose than cash-hungry startups.

If Google & Meta haven't released chatGPT-like things, it's not because they can't. It's because they won't.' (https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1617908306420600833)

To your point on reputation: Didn't Meta recently unpublish a LLM after it was shown to hallucinate wrong answers? Smaller AI companies would have stuck to their guns, but Meta has internal controls to guard against damaging the "brand". IIRC, the tweet announcing the retraction was particularly salty,<speculation> sounded like someone whose hand was forced</speculation>

Yes, the Galactica LLM by Meta. Though LeCun isn't an author in the paper, he is "Chief AI Scientist for Facebook AI Research (FAIR)"[0], and he was quite angry about closing the Galactica demo[1].

[0] https://ai.facebook.com/people/yann-lecun/

[1] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1593293058174500865

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