Comment by echelon
15 days ago
It varies on a company to company basis. BOOX, for instance, are notorious GPL violators.
There's also significant alpha in releasing open weights models. You get to slow down the market leaders to make sure they don't have runaway success. It reduces moats, slows funding, creates a wealth of competition, reduces margin. It's a really smart move if you want to make sure there's a future where you can compete with Google, OpenAI, etc. There's even a chance it makes those companies bleed a little. The value chain moves to differently shaped companies (tools, infra) leaving space for consumer and product to not necessarily be won by the "labs" companies.
If you look at releasing "everything" from the perspective of a quant and purely so, then the objective to dominate a metric relevant to the quant is obviously the motive. But it's impossible to prove and a very strong assumption with little to no data. If DeepSeek's parent company traded on the data and release of DeepSeek with quant models that target affected firms with shorts before release, then that's a whole new level of WOW and honestly great funds do that. But this is a too big and bold of a move to underpin motive.
But believing a man could achieve such a feat alone is inspiring to be frank.