Releasing model weights is more powerful, but far less accessible than releasing an API. You can easily waste an hour trying to get a model from a research pape

Releasing model weights is more powerful, but far less accessible than releasing an API. You can easily waste an hour trying to get a model from a research paper running, even when everything works smoothly, just having the wrong environment or dependencies. And that’s for people who are already savvy with ML. Releasing a Docker container is a lot closer to making things easily accessible but still not close to an API. If you look at the audience using GPT-3, a lot of it is software engineers who are experienced but don’t have AI-centric experience. In practice, making an API available is making the model available to many more people.