Reminds me of the story of an ex-Coca-Cola employee who offered to sell the secret recipe to Pepsi. Pepsi immediately let Coca-Cola know and it was handled. Not a good look for OpenAI. They come off as desperate and unprofessional.
Even if they were to take the recipe and publish it for all to see, you would still need all of the other machinery that is Coca-Cola to make Coca-Cola.
And then you have issues of quality. Coca-Cola has certain standards, it's not a guarantee that everyone else will have those same standards. Like, people buy the expensive brand of milk despite all milk being the same. It's one ingredient. With quality standards given by the government. There is really no room for interpretation.
What about quality? That has nothing to do with it.
Of course they're trying to be the better coke, that's why they tried making coke with the same color with more sugar and made the flavors stronger.
Even if you could replicate the exact flavor, you’d still need to do it at scale and get it into stores and convince people to buy it.
As to “just make it yourself”, everyone can make a sandwich, Jersey Mike’s and several other sandwich shops exist successfully.
I’m saying the formula is immaterial. It’s also about being able to produce at scale, market, and distribute.
At one time most people had respect, even people at the top, now many people just do what they want. Plus most of the time they get away with it.
"just do it and ask for forgiveness later"
is what the entire LLM industry is based on. They swallowed up all of society’s copyrighted texts without really asking for permission from anyone. This is just par for the course for them it seems unfortunately.
IP theft can really pay off.
It's been demonstrated over centuries that this is unreliable. We end up needing a third party (commonly governments) to step in and establish rules and referee behavior. We wouldn't have an EPA, FCC, SEC, or many other organizations and laws if private actors could successfully police themselves.