I don't fully disagree, but I also think there is a layer of complication here that goes beyond OpenAI's hopes of monetization (which are clearly a factor). I

I don't fully disagree, but I also think there is a layer of complication here that goes beyond OpenAI's hopes of monetization (which are clearly a factor). I maintain an open source ML deployment platform, and I've interacted with a bunch of teams that have used it to deploy GPT-2. It was actually the platform AI Dungeon built their app on. GPT-2 is a beast to deploy—it's huge (almost 6 GB fully trained), requires GPUs, and scales fairly poorly. You need to autoscale GPU instances aggressively to handle any kind of real time inference situation with it, and even with spot instances, that gets expensive quick. GPT-2 is 1.5 billion parameters, and at the time, was scandalously large. GPT-3 is 175 billion. For a model that large, there's real questions around whether it's even feasible for the average team to use it if it is not hosted somewhere else as a third party API. From that perspective, I think the value OpenAI captures with the API is less about the exclusivity of the model itself, but the exclusivity of their infrastructure. Because of that, I wouldn't be surprised to see them open source the model for research. However, I 100% agree that the fact that the model still isn't open is concerning, and it casts some doubts on whether or not it will ultimately happen in the future.