
Ask HN: How can AI companies have proprietary technologies? - chienomi
Machine learning technologies have doubtlessly been improved and AI companies are emerging these days.<p>Almost all of these technologies are open to the public, including the source code, in some cases. How can a company own a unique AI technology then?
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dwringer
I'm not sure I'm able to provide a solid answer, but I would venture to say
that to the extent a neuromorphic or neural "deep learning" network relies on
an expensive training process, its inherent value becomes more-or-less unique
to each specific implementation. Having the source code to build one's own
implementation would not replace what could be hundreds of thousands of
processor hours spent analyzing petabytes of data. In that case it would
depend on whether the trained models were released under the open-source
model, or only the underlying architecture.

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chienomi
Thanks. This can explain the situation where most people are struggling to
replicate a neat result in a paper.

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dwringer
Well, I'm afraid of that I am not so sure. A well-designed paper should
demonstrate what the training process was and use a publicly available dataset
for training. There are many repositories of training data that exist
specifically to provide a standard like this in various domains, so anyone
following a paper should be able to use the same training process on the same
data and get the same result. A paper presenting a result that cannot be
obtained in this way can be informative but does not substitute for peer-
reviewed research.

