In his research paper “Access to the Frontier: Open Source AI and Downstream Innovation” Dominik Asam studies the impact of openly available frontier AI models on innovation dynamics in downstream markets.
His paper examines the downstream innovation impact of the leak of Meta’s Llama model on model creation on Hugging Face. After the leak, new developers entered the “market”, enhancing competition, whereas incumbent developers moved to domains where their expertise remained a source of differentiation. The study illustrates competitive reactions to the entry of new developers and highlights the innovation-related welfare loss of keeping frontier models private and closed.
The jury particularly commended the interesting and highly relevant novel context, as well as the strong empirical identification setup based on the unexpected leak of the Llama model. The jury further emphasized that the overall question is highly important – namely, the dynamic welfare implications of closed versus open foundation models. The paper was praised for being interesting, well-written, and well-researched.
The DRUID Best Young Scholar Paper Award is dedicated to Steven Klepper, a professor of economics and social sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, who passed away far too soon in May 2013. An internationally recognized scholar, Klepper made fundamental contributions to the study of entrepreneurship, innovation, and industrial evolution.
Since 1995, DRUID has been a hub for premier research on innovation and the dynamics of structural, institutional and geographic change. The conference originated from the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics and was founded by scholars from Copenhagen Business School and Aalborg University. It has grown into one of the world’s leading platforms for exchange among researchers in innovation studies, management, economics, and entrepreneurship. Held annually at rotating international locations, DRUID brings together both established and early-career scholars. Recent editions have taken place in Toronto, Nice, Lisbon, and Copenhagen.