Thibault Schrepel on AI competition and the evolving advantage of new AI models
ICLE Academic Affiliate Thibault Schrepel was quoted in Fast Company Middle East article on how the new AI models are now being matched by competitors within weeks, often through rapid fine tuning and distillation, which is shrinking developers’ competitive advantages and may lead to a market split between low cost widely available models and premium systems of high stakes tasks. Read the full report here.
The definition of what “open” means in model licenses is partly to blame, says Thibault Schrepel, an associate professor of law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who studies competition in foundation models. “Very often we hear that a system is or is not open source,” he says. “I think it’s very limited as a way to understand what is or what is not open source.”
It’s important to examine the actual terms of those licenses, Schrepel adds. “If you look carefully at the licenses of all the models, they actually very much limit what you can do with what they call open-source,” he says. Meta’s Llama 3 license, for instance, includes a trigger for very large services but not smaller ones. “If you deploy it to more than 700 million users, then you have to ask for a license,” Schrepel says. That two-tier system can create gray areas where questionable practices can emerge.