Good thing Linus didn't think the same way, we'd all use paid Windows today!
They were talking about making models in a more collaborative fashion, which is a non-obvious problem. Models are heavy, single-task oriented and expensive to train from scratch.
The big companies can leverage it, but so can the small startups, government, solo developers, non-profit orgs, charities... anyone in the world, actually.
That's the great thing about open source. It's for everyone without discrimination.
There's only so many groups that can leverage and profit from costly blackboxes that predict people's behavior. Additionally, i view ML as a hyperscaler version of science: you're trading money (training hw) for expert time. Most of the time FLOSS and other non-capitalistic entities will have few of the former and (reasonably) much of the later.
edit: i'm probably being a bit hyperbolic about the usecases for ML. But the hyperscaler thing still holds: most of the interesting usecases i know of could be done more lowtech with more expert knowledge, with more parcimonious usage of stochastic optimization.
Well if we could give away all the valuable things, companies couldn't profit from selling anything - the thing would already be free! So we should all do more work for free so as not to be taken advantage of by those companies. Now who's with _me_?
Ughh.. I think we need openly sourced models and open-sourced data, but also am pessimistic about how much the current market forces will try to either just appropriate the results or plain simply suppress the spread of those results.
For all that FOSS has come to(I'm happy, but disappointed) I feel like the difficulties of building a business around FOSS is still a pretty big force keeping it's growth down. Not sure there's a change anytime soon.
I predict (open-source) model building and data collation and creation is gonna have these same problems.
hmm, maybe I'm a pessimistic misanthrope.