Ask HN: How do you license a deep learning model for commercial usage
I’ve been studying and developing my own deep learning model that serve a very niche market. I have acquired some interest clients that would love to buy the model including the final model weights, training pipeline. I’m pretty new to this field so I’m not sure where to begin on the commercial licenses. Any suggestions from HN would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Hi. First of all, congratulations! This is nice to hear.
I ran a consulting company that did bespoke ML products then built a product that supported us doing that (MLOps) to ship faster, then turned it into a product company with that product (it offered real-time collaborative notebooks, training, tracking, packaging, deploying, and monitoring models on all major cloud providers and on customer data sources).
I've written a Tweet that could be helpful: https://x.com/jugurthahadjar/status/1310668293305499653
It depends on the "maturity" of your clients. Some have technical capabilities and they'll be just fine with your model: they can deploy and monitor and use it within their systems. They may or may not have monitoring and you'll probably have to deal with drift as time goes by.
Others will want to interact with some interface (REST API or something).
Some will want an entire application specifically for a role/department: front-end, user management, etc.
And some will just want to use it and you deal with everything. Have you thought of making a product for that niche, so it's not just the model and the pipeline, but a whole application that solves this niche's problem?
Hi. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. As I mentioned, I’m quite new to this, and your answer brought up some important questions I hadn’t considered. I believe it would be best to discuss these further with the clients.
Would it be alright if I reached out to you via email in the future if I have any additional questions? I noticed your email in your profile.
>Would it be alright if I reached out to you via email in the future if I have any additional questions? I noticed your email in your profile.
Yes, with pleasure.
Why not make it a SaaS?
It’s more suitable to be integrated into an existing hardware product than a SaaS.