I think there's a concern also that smaller companies can gain a competitive edge via resistance to reputational damage. As Yann LeCun recently tweeted:
'By releasing public demos that, as impressive & useful as they may be, have major flaws, established companies have less to gain & more to lose than cash-hungry startups.
To your point on reputation: Didn't Meta recently unpublish a LLM after it was shown to hallucinate wrong answers? Smaller AI companies would have stuck to their guns, but Meta has internal controls to guard against damaging the "brand". IIRC, the tweet announcing the retraction was particularly salty,<speculation> sounded like someone whose hand was forced</speculation>
Yes, the Galactica LLM by Meta. Though LeCun isn't an author in the paper, he is "Chief AI Scientist for Facebook AI Research (FAIR)"[0], and he was quite angry about closing the Galactica demo[1].
'By releasing public demos that, as impressive & useful as they may be, have major flaws, established companies have less to gain & more to lose than cash-hungry startups.
If Google & Meta haven't released chatGPT-like things, it's not because they can't. It's because they won't.' (https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1617908306420600833)