Why a one-way lab and why sponsorships instead of a SaaS product: A few people have asked why I am not just offering this as “GPT for inventions”. A product th

Why a one-way lab and why sponsorships instead of a SaaS product: A few people have asked why I am not just offering this as “GPT for inventions”. A product that anyone can prompt. Three reasons (this is my current reasoning, subject to change): Safety and incentives. If the engine was exposed as a generic invention API, there would be strong incentives to push it into areas I do not want to automate or publish (offense-heavy domains, surveillance optimizations, etc.). Keeping it as a one-way lab allows steering towards domains with positive human impact. Mission alignment. The point of this project is to create a massive public library of prior art that is hard to appropriate and easy to build on. Charging per-generation access to the engine pushes in the opposite direction. I would rather keep the core engine pointed at “public good” domains and let people use the outputs freely. Funding reality. There are real running costs (models, infra, time), so it cannot be self funded forever. Demand for an ai invention tools that gives away the secret sauce is generally low among the public sector. The model we are exploring is domain sponsorship: A sponsor funds a track (or tracks), for example “wildfire resilience” or “low-cost diagnostics”. We configure and run cohorts of the engine focused on that track. The output still goes into the public library and through all disclosure channels with clear notice that the track was sponsored; there are no exclusive rights. That feels like a better fit for what this is trying to be: infrastructure for open innovation rather than another IP-wrapping startup. If you have opinions on better funding structures for this kind of thing, I would genuinely like to hear them. I am trying to avoid the failure mode where something starts as “for the commons” and drifts into enclosure because of financial pressure.