The issue here is ACM focusing on licensing. A non profit would not be able to pay ACM for access. Hence why this policy is hypocritical: it gives more power to the larger players and undermines smaller actors in the field who have fewer resources.
It's a racket.
Guess the single strongest predictor of paper in field per year?
but you want sweet grant money, you play the game by the rules.
researcher that don't want to play the grant game can go and find a VC to subsidy product creation
A non profit could well pay, and there are plenty of reasons frontier models should be managed by non profit. After all, why allow a for profit to benefit from free contributions?
If you're offering me $300/hr and the other guy is offering me $400/hr, a whole lot of things start to matter more than the differential.
That gets at the "fungibility" notion you refer to. Money has the same nominal value everywhere, but different real value based on how much of it you already have. Which is to say that the marginal value of money drops pretty precipitously several times at certain thresholds that relate to the particulars of the economy (when you can afford to eat, when you can afford a house, when you can afford to not work anymore, and so on).
I’m not sure which Catholic saint said that, but one requires a minimum of material conditions in order to practice spiritual virtues.
> when you can afford to eat, when you can afford a house, when you can afford to not work anymore, and so on
When you can buy a government, a couple billion seems like a small loss.
And when the open weights models distill all the content out of the majors anyway?