Jason Antic

1/ I think it's time to address a question/criticism I've been getting quite a bit which was fully expected when going into making DeOldify into a business: Why not be awesome and give out the latest and greatest DeOldify for free? For the greater good?

It seems like a false dichotomy to say that you won't be rewarded if you make your work available. Empirically, that doesn't seem true. There are many examples. And you'll always have the latest version to yourself, because no one else has the means to go faster.

Can you expand upon that? I'm not sure which examples you're thinking of that would be applicable. Honest question.

Reddit was open source for a long time. It didn't matter. Large parts of Facebook are open source. It strengthened their position. StyleGAN is open source. You could say that nVidia can subsidize the cost since they're a big company, but it would have been an advantage.

Most of id software's engines are open source now. Unreal engine is fully open source. PhysX is open source. None of these seem to have caused problems. And I'm skeptical it would have caused any problems if they were open source from the beginning.

I think the missing piece here is that it's relatively uncommon in the AI world to release code and say "You can't use this for commercial purposes." But... it's actually not *that* uncommon. StyleGAN does it.

Still, no one will blame you for taking the safe option. I'm only saying anything because it seems like it might work against your interests long-term to keep it closed. A healthy "modding community" around DeOldify seems like it would only help you. (Ditto for AI dungeon.)

Another way to look at it: Are you sure you'd be as well-known as you are now if you hadn't made the original DeOldify model open source? How many other closed-source models have brought fame and fortune to their creators? (I'm genuinely interested in answers to this.)