IMO the main reason these companies don't release their models is not ethical concerns but money:
- NVIDIA sells GPUs and interconnect needed for training large models. Releasing a pretrained LM would hurt sales, while only publishing a teaser paper boosts them.
- Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offer ML-as-a-service and TPU/GPU hardware as a part of their cloud computing platforms. Russian and Chinese companies also have their clouds, but they have low global market share and aren't cost-efficient, so nobody would use them to train large LMs anyway.
- OpenAI are selling their models as an API with a huge markup over inference costs; they are also largely sponsored by the aforementioned companies, further aligning their interests with them.
Companies that release large models are simply those who have nothing to lose by doing so. Unfortunately, you need a lot of idle hardware to train them, and companies that have it tend to also launch a public cloud with it, so there is a perpetual conflict of interests here.
- NVIDIA sells GPUs and interconnect needed for training large models. Releasing a pretrained LM would hurt sales, while only publishing a teaser paper boosts them.
- Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offer ML-as-a-service and TPU/GPU hardware as a part of their cloud computing platforms. Russian and Chinese companies also have their clouds, but they have low global market share and aren't cost-efficient, so nobody would use them to train large LMs anyway.
- OpenAI are selling their models as an API with a huge markup over inference costs; they are also largely sponsored by the aforementioned companies, further aligning their interests with them.
Companies that release large models are simply those who have nothing to lose by doing so. Unfortunately, you need a lot of idle hardware to train them, and companies that have it tend to also launch a public cloud with it, so there is a perpetual conflict of interests here.