What tool was used for video generation?
With manim, it's probably legal (I think MIT license?), but in general, it makes the world a worse place.
That's very clear. That's why we have spyware, ad tech, WWII-era German chemical weapons, the East India Company, Oracle's business model, fintech, ...
Ask anyone 40 years older. Regrets focus on time with family and meaningful work. Few people think: "Did I innovate enough?"
> We simply can't open source this because we're rewriting and rebuilding it every day.
I don't quite see the logical connection in this sentence.
Everything I've worked on in the past 15 years is open-source. I suspect you'd:
- Be able to find modest amounts of funding to do this in the open space (e.g. within the academy, as a teaching professor, adjunct, or similar) -- enough to sustain yourself, but without a promise of riches
- Be able to "innovate," make more E($), and do less harm in corporate America
It would also make it easier for competitors to build products that compete directly with us, such as https://studio.academa.ai. That would make it harder for my startup to succeed.
I'm not building this for the sake of making money. I simply need enough protected space to innovate competitively and give the company the best chance to succeed. If it does, I'll be able to keep building and pushing education forward for years to come.
Personally, I just used chatgpt the other day to _finally_ understand why a dot product of vectors is equivalent to cosine similarity. Mathacademy's lesson is very good but the explanation wasn't enlightening for me, it took chatgpt breaking it down into tiny bite-sized chunks, patiently re-explaining what a cosine actually is and where it disappears to in the dot product, making little animations of vectors with sliders that I could move myself to try stuff with differently shaped and rotated triangles, for me to _actually and viscerally understand it_ and after spending probably 2 hours on this simple concept, now I _actually_ feel like I understand it rather than having just memorized it. So I feel much more confident that I can build deeper understanding on top of that.
Plenty of open source is updated every day.
You had no problem taking advantage of Manim to profit, but when it comes to returning the great favor done to you by Manim being open source, you don't care?
Okay.
You may not believe me, and you may think I have ulterior motives, but I don't. My only goal is to build technology that meaningfully advances education.
I believe you entirely. That comes across in everything you say. Huge harm has been done in education precisely by people with similarly amoral motivation. History of education is filled with case after case of amoral motivations leading to immoral behavior.
Other industries have this more extreme. Fritz Haber is a biography worth reading.
The comments you're making aren't very honest -- I suspect with yourself more than with anyone else. For example:
> Maintaining an open-source project requires significant time and effort.
No. It doesn't. You need to flip the "public" bit on github and post a "caveat emptor" shingle. The effort you're cloning -- manim -- did exactly that. The result was a synergistic, friendly, manim-ce.
And the author has been able to work full-time in this space, his entire career, without doing anything evil, unethical, harmful, or unpleasant, and strictly advancing the world.
You're competing -- rather than cooperating -- with folks like him.
> I simply need enough protected space to innovate competitively and give the company the best chance to succeed.
You don't seem to understand how this works. A few points:
- Education is a highly-regulated industry for good reasons (student harm, societal harm, privacy risks, etc.), and education research goes through IRBs for similar reasons.
- Startups can work on IP, but usually -- and especially in education -- networks, connections, support, etc. are more important. It's hard to build an IP moat.
- Startups have a 95% failure rate. I'd give this one more than that.
A few corollaries:
a) With the current model, you'll have a hard time building partnerships with the people you need, and indeed, people (myself included!) will be rooting for you to fail. That weakens, not strengthens, your odds of success.
b) An example of another way to accomplish your stated goal is a five-year research grant, or a position which supports doing this kind of work (e.g. instructional staff at your university). Those have >> 5% success rates.
c) Open business models aren't less likely to be successful here than closed ones. Red Hat sold for $34B.
Otherwise, my best wish for you is to fail fast, and to learn a lot from the process.
Speaking of which, it happened before, too, in the 1970's with personal computer software.