Hey!
Tl;DR: College student, researching KD, need better finance, wants to know if open sourcing my research would put me in at disadvantage in future if I want to start a startup based around Deep learning/AI/LLMs
I’m a clg student rn and I’m currently researching Knowledge distillation with LLM on kaggle. And thanks to the open source community’s support I’ve been able to make some if not a lot of steady progress. And If it actually ends up being fruitful and I make significant progress I want to share it to the open source community and possibly post my model’s in GitHub/hugging face purely as a way to pay back.
Now, eventually I actually wish to build my own revenue generating startup as I wish to in some amount help myself and my parents. But rn before deciding something as significant as one or the other, I’d like some opinions on what would actually contributing to the open source community be used (job hunt, interview etc)/ or am I better off going completely private if that’s what I wish to do in future/how much I should publish to the open source community so that I don’t hurt my chances of startup etc.
- Value of your service for customers is the gold key to business success. Private model can be an advantage but is usually not the key (unless your model is ChatGPT).
- The most common failure reason is few people know and buy your product. There are so many open sourcing projects which nobody cares! Open-sourcing choice itself is not so important in startup early-stage, but will highly impact your business model when your startup grows.
- Open sourcing can be a kind of advertising which help your product reach non-tech customers via their tech friends or KOL.