Comment by Cynddl
10 hours ago
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.
Everybody gives more power to the larger players. You won't work for me for $10/hr but you'll work for a guy who has more money for more. There's nothing wrong with that. Money is just a fungible unit representing value offered.
I think your example hinges more on the fact that $10/hr is a desperation wage. It's not enough to buy you a life where you're not stepped on by others. The further up that chain you move the more other things start to matter, at least for most people.
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).
Why did you sign off your copyright to ACM then? If you kept the copyright and prevented others from distributing your work, you could be the sole distributor and negotiate the price with the AI company yourself.
Because if you don't publish in academia, you might as well be dead. And the terms for most places to publish are similar.
It's a racket.
Ok, then next question is why are you in academia? To share knowledge with humanity, bring the Promethean light to the mortals or something I guess. But then if they use it for productive things that make money, that's too smelly, that's too practical, too dirty, or what?
Non Profit != No Money
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?
A non-Profit like OpenAI? Oh wait I guess that can change.
>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.
And when the open weights models distill all the content out of the majors anyway?