I agree. The frontier models are based on training data from tons of copyrighted work. Some of that work was obtained illegally, even. They could not exist without strip-mining the commons. The labs have no moral or ethical ownership to the end result, and others should feel free to treat any company-imposed restrictions on their use as invalid.
I don't expect Tan's position to be based on any kind of real moral high ground, but his conclusion is correct.
I love the "illicit distillation attacks" framing from the incumbents. There's nothing illicit. There's no attack. You just don't like it because it threatens your market position and business model.
With the recent Navier-Stokes controversy, I think there's a credible suspicion that all your IP you run through these models will end up in these companies' possession. OpenAI themselves has admitted a weak version of this (that prompts might inadvertedly end up improving the model). We don't know the extent of this.
Obviously it's not possible to run a company whose value is predicated on its IP that uploads said IP to a third party which might get access to it.
This could mean every potential serious customer would have no option but to seek alternatives to these online services.
I thought this was commonly accepted to be the case that companies which sell access to LLMs are also storing and training on the inputs?
I don't mean this as rhetoric, I did not think many people (except possibly those operating under government contracts, and 'normies' who don't know about these things) were under the belief that their IP was kept secret when they use these services.
Some offer zero data retention policies, but there can be weasel words. For example, on the individual pro plan, you can turn off the setting that lets them train models on your data, but they still have a section in their terms that allows them to evaluate your anonymized data for statistical and "research" purposes. You have to actually get a signed contract along with an enterprise plan that spells out exactly what they're going to use, and what settings enable what retention.
Seems naive to think that those providers - who have a financial interest in selling the data - would not also try to weasel out of the precise definition of ‘zero’ retention.
I have no inside information, but I always assume the tickboxes that "disable ____ data" from Google/Facebook/OpenAI just disconnects it from your own account, not hides it from the provider.
There's no independent verification of what that checkbox actually does. The company can say anything, and you are unable to verify that they actually do it.
The only verification you could do so far is GDPR-style data export, and also the adherence to GDPR regulations (and even those might get skirted if they aren't operating in europe).
Aren’t they usually phrased very specifically as “we collect this data and use it to show you relevant ads, you can opt out of us showing you relevant ads”?
What about inference providers like Baseten, Modal, Fireworks, Together, etc? I thought one of their value propositions was inference (using open weights models) that guarantees with crisp terms that they will not use your data.
I worked very briefly at Baseten, and I can say that it was a perpetual annoyance (from an engineering perspective) that customers would complain about issues with their models but we couldn't actually see the inputs/outputs. I don't know about the other providers, but at Baseten they literally weren't stored anywhere.
A provider can genuinely avoid storing inputs, as the Baseten engineer below describes. That is still different from proving what code received the prompt or protecting plaintext while it runs; I built TrustedRouter to separate ZDR, attestation, and confidential routes: https://trustedrouter.com/blog/attestation-is-all-you-need?u...
> to separate ZDR, attestation, and confidential routes
Could you please clarify what that means? Given what I've been searching for, I might in principle be part of your intended customer profile, but I can't figure out whether you are merely doing routing (alternative to OpenRouter) or also inference (alternative to the names I've mentioned above). If it's merely routing, then how do you protect me from any potential misbehavior on the part of the inference provider?
Just feedback for what you're building, so please take this in a positive spirit... I'm an AI researcher and not quite an infra guy, and I'm making recommendations on token APIs for several less knowledgeable around me (I've gotten a few people set up with Baseten recently), and I couldn't figure out whether/why I would be interested in TrustedRouter. You should communicate the story better :-)
EDIT: Here's what I now understand after some digging; please correct if wrong.
There are some M token providers (not the names I listed above?) who provide cryptographic guarantees about inference services. But somebody still needs to verify what they do on each request. For an individual running a single harness, that harness would be a logical place to perform this verification if possible. For an org with N users each running their own harness, TrustedRouter solves the N*M problem and becomes the single gateway for trusted inference -- provided one somehow trusts/verifies TrustedRouter.
AWS and Azure give you the same thing for Claude and ChatGPT, no need to be stuck with open weights. They might sometimes store some of it for other purposes (I don't know the specifics), but it is emphatically not being fed back to OpenAI or Anthropic.
I would wager that’s more acceptable if said learning is not in competition with the user. If they didn’t actually produce results but created the model only, then that could be advantageous for users too. But the moment they absorb your work to sell it, or for marketing, it’s a different moral ground.
You have some secret sauce. The model trains on it. Your competitor is solving a similar problem. The model "advantageously" helps them.
Your competitor is happy and continues to pay for the subscription. Sam and Dario just resold your code.
For what it's worth LLMs still suck at reproducing my little secret algorithm/implementation while being able to solve way harder problems. I have a good guess why that's the case.
> I thought this was commonly accepted to be the case that companies which sell access to LLMs are also storing and training on the inputs?
The services have toggles to allow prompts to be used in the training set. There is a conspiracy theory that the toggle is a false distraction and they’re actually keeping everything, and that none of the employees involved will ever whistleblow this fact.
Outside of Internet comment sections, I think most people assume these US-based companies are doing what they say.
For enterprise use there are services like AWS Bedrock which have strict isolation guarantees. There are some people who still believe those guarantees are a lie, but once someone has reached that point I don’t think they trust anything that isn’t running entirely within their house. People in that category are a very small minority, but a very vocal minority.
The impression I have (from interacting with people IRL using OpenAI and Anthropics offerings, and how they feel about the risks involved) is just the opposite. But we probably just have different life experiences.
I can name groups of people I interact with who lean both ways.
It’s still a commonly held belief that “Facebook sells your data” and it’s cool to be cynical about everything tech in many social scenes. Conceding that a tech company might be honest about something will get you classified as a bootlicker depending on who you talk to so the only winning move is to be super cynical.
Among actual professionals I work with in tech and legal, almost nobody holds a belief that these companies are blatantly lying to their customers (and zero of their employees are whistleblowing it, while said companies also have employees trying to whistleblow AI safety on Twitter daily)
I also don’t think these companies are lying at all, but I definitely think they’re training on all your data, toggle or not.
It’s truly trivial to “anonymize” and distill your prompts and model output. They could use just about any off-the-shelf cheap model for this. In fact, their TOS explicitly allows this, even with the toggle checked.
What that probably means is that the EXACT content of your prompt is secret. But the actual ideas are not. If you discover something truly novel, then yeah they get that. They can absorb trends in consumer behavior, too.
I’m sure if someone had access to all my paraphrased prompts, which retain 0% of my exact wording, they could find out literally everything about me. It’s a bit like how collecting metadata is as good (or better!) than collecting the real data.
And we all know “anonymizing” data doesn’t really exist like we think it does. Just removing names and identifiers doesn’t make anything anonymous for motivated actors. Or… say… an LLM that is trained to recognize patterns in text. Which is, like, all of them.
Yes, I am talking about working professionals who use LLMs. Before this thread, I would have considered it surprisingly and singularly naïve if someone told me they trusted OpenAI. I still believe the common and correct take is that these companies are largely training on customer data against their consent.
I don't think they are "blatantly" lying either, just normal bog-standard lying that we've all come to accept. It's a profitable and competitive tech company.
We have already seen this lying. The toggles are opt-out, not opt-in. When you sign up, you agree to binding arbitration, which is effective for preventing lawsuits in the US. The toggles are regularly turned back on without our consent on ChatGPT and Claude. OpenAI's "don't train on my content" setting isn't even in the ChatGPT interface.
As far as I know, they haven't suffered even a tiny controversy in public opinion over any of this at all.
There's nothing to whistleblow about when it's public knowledge.
How many of the people who checked those boxes have cryptographic proof they did it? How many of those people have opted out of the arbitration clause? How many of those people would be able to claim damages? Would the amount of people who satisfy all three questions be large enough to make it worth _not_ training on user data?
> OpenAI themselves has admitted a weak version of this (that prompts might inadvertedly end up improving the model). We don't know the extent of this.
I think this is being misunderstood. Codex has a toggle to allow your prompts to be included in training data. They’re saying they can’t be sure if the person had it on or off while using Codex to discuss the work.
They’re not saying that some prompts are mysteriously jumping into training data.
Also, there is a large market for AI services which don’t retain anything under any circumstances for enterprise customers.
yes this is my understanding as well, and based on [1] seems to be the case. I don't know why everyone is just believing the un-backed accusations of people probably just didn't turn off said setting (and if they did why have they not said anything to such effect)
> I don't know why everyone is just believing the un-backed accusations
Conspiratorial thinking is very common on these topics. Even bringing up the conspiracy theory about Instagram listening to your conversations and showing you related ads will bring up a surprising amount of people defending that idea on Hacker News.
Or these customers could just use AWS Bedrock...but their current CEO is an incompetent MBA unable to publicly articulate their biggest advantage, in the context of the current AI usage my companies.
You have access to all the frontier models, but...your inputs are not shared with the model vendors...neither are used to train the next model.
Why am I even doing the Amazon board job for them!??
Bedrock is really bad. It seems like they don't host the models very well because they produce tons of bugs/errors calling the model. For example you can end up with Anthropic models not returning a stop token and you end up waiting for a timeout thinking its doing something when it isn't.
Amazon is deeply invested in Anthropic and would not defame them through marketing a service whose selling point was their startup's breach of contracts.
Lucky for us Apple is already alleging something to this effect in their trade secret lawsuit, so you know they'll make sure discovery turns this up if it exists.
Anthropic happily paid billions to settle a lawsuit for pirating books. It's a trivial cost of doing business. If you're lucky you'll get a pittance after the fact by suing them, but a contract doesn't prevent them from doing the thing you don't want them to do and that they are obviously going to do given their past behaviour.
A lot substance is hinged on the exact definition of the word "data" or "user data". In the age of post-truth everyone is claiming that they keep no "user data". Except that after running it once through some transformer program it's no longer "user data", it's something entirely else and these corpos gave ZERO promises regarding such laundered/transformed data at all, ever.
Just a thought experiment: considering training seems to be 'fair use', I wonder if they trained a tiny model to retain key info from your prompts, would mean that this would still constitute fair use, and allow them to legally claim they don't retain your data.
The guarantee on this is a (contractual) “trust me bro”, and a right to try to sue a multi-trillion-dollar company who will absolutely drive you into the ground with legal red tape.
If you are big enough to be able to withstand that, you’re already running (or trying to run) your own/open-weight models.
ZDR is based on the exact same pinky-promise as training opt-outs. There is no technical barrier to OpenAI, or whoever is running your compute, retaining your prompt after they run inference on their servers. If you don't control the hardware the model is being inferenced on, you don't control your data.
> OpenAI themselves has admitted a weak version of this (that prompts might inadvertedly end up improving the model).
2023:
"The approach also aligned with the company’s broader deployment strategy, to gradually release technologies into the world for people to get used to them. Some executives, including Altman, started to parrot the same line: OpenAI needed to get the “data flywheel” going."
Abolish copyright and make it less ridiculous. Sampling music was never a thing that required royalties until the 1990s when I guess someone got angry that rappers were making money off their sampled music. Its insane to me. Make it illegal to transfer ownership of copyrighted work too, only the spouse or one single inheritor who isnt a company can have the rights transferred, after both die, the work enters public domain.
LLMs should just pay a flat fee to use a specific book and thats it. Fees should be reasonable (not a million dollars per book), so long as the model doesnt spit out the entire book.
If someone really wants to ask a million dollars to let a book be trained on, ok their choice, maybe not getting any customers though. If someone really pays then cool, you deserve it for making what is apparently a very useful book. There are encyclopedias that probably cost more than that to make and would sell for more.
Lol um no everyone benefits from copyrights and IP. If were being flippant how about people just steal your private code and monetize it!? Copyright makes the creative world turn.
Yeah, I'm fine with copyright existing even though it's messy. That said, if you put your copyright image on a public site with no watermark and Google Images shows it, skill issue.
> Make it illegal to transfer ownership of copyrighted work too, only the spouse or one single inheritor who isnt a company can have the rights transferred, after both die, the work enters public domain.
By your phrasing, it sounds like you still intend the possibility of companies owning copyrights; but how does that happen (other than copyrights already owned by companies grandfathered in)?
Copyright always starts off in the hands of individual human beings; it only ends up in the hands of companies when those human beings transfer ownership to a company. That ownership transfer can be automatic as a term of a contract, e.g. as part of a work-for-hire agreement. But no contract can cause the copyright to come into existence already held by the company instead of the individual. So if you abolish ownership transfer, you effectively make work-for-hire IP assignment invalid. What replaces it?
And, if "nothing"... then how do people pool the IP rights of their own small contributions to a large-scale work, into an IP pool that can be legally defended by a coherent legal entity, so that the large-scale work itself can have market value (i.e. so that sales of polished commercial bootlegs don't drive sales of the "authentic" work to zero)?
Keep in mind that, no matter how much we might want "mass distributed" media to have more-reasonable IP terms, the ability to sue for infringement is still critical to the existence of some forms of media. Especially "location-based" media, with no equivalent licensed broadcast right: movies still in theatre; concerts; live performances of plays and musicals; etc. If there's no legal team that can sue a movie theatre that shows an unlicensed copy of a given movie, then no movie theatre will ever bother with licensing movies again; "box office" goes to zero (from the movie company's perspective); and the incentive to create movies in the first place declines massively.
(You can see what this alternate world looks like from the few cases where movies screwed up the steps required to assert copyright, back before copyright was automatic. Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a good example: theatres — even upstanding large-chain theatres! — did indeed leap at the opportunity to show the movie unlicensed, and so Romero et al made effectively zero revenue off the work.)
I'm not saying this is an impossible problem. There are ways to accomplish this besides the way it's done now. (For example, individual-contributor IP could be retained by the original owners, but cross-licensed between individuals through a collaboration structure to form a coherent defensible IP pool, in exactly the same way that IP for e.g. video codecs is cross-licensed between corporations to form a coherent defensible IP pool today.) I'm just pointing out that the problem does need to be solved.
One of the most infamous legal challenges to sampled music was MARRS "Pump Up the Volume" in the 1980s, and that was preceded by other famous cases. Not sure why you think that started in the 1990s.
This is nitpicky. The MARRS case was 1987, and Biz Markie and Vanilla Ice are way higher on the list in terms of actually getting attention on the issue and influencing culture.
If the leading private labs attempt to use the government to pull up the ladder under the pretense of "safety" then the response of the people should be to take such questions out of private hands and nationalize the leading labs.
Or they could abide by the precedents they set and learn to compete. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.
The problem here is you need a trustworthy government for nationalizing to make a difference. The current US admin started with DOGE and a crypto rug pull.
Vote (well-informed of the candidate's policies) in every election you can, even the local ones that seem of little consequence.
Convince others to vote.
Make demands of your elected representatives. You can mail them, call them, etc.
The government is the people.
The Reagan-era and beyond successful convincing of people that the government is an unchangeable black box made up of shady actors out to destroy everything (see: Republicans still going on about the 'deep state' when they run literally everything) is a big part of how we got to this place. It was a self-fulfilling lie, now coming true as the people who sold the lie start grasping for unending power.
But we still have the ability to vote our way out of it. If we continue to fail to do so, then at an evolutionary level we have to consider that we collectively deserve all the bad that comes from it.
Voting only changes things when it doesn’t threaten the interests of elites or there is a sufficient counterweight in terms of a competitor nation or a radical labor movement or an uncontrolled armed insurgency.
See salvador allende in chile and mitternand in france for examples of voting without sufficient leverage.
your regan example occurred during a successful counterattack by capital that started under carter and crushed the labor movement.
Sometimes voting changes things, sometimes it doesn't. Naturally it's in the nature of most governments to not wildly change every election. This is usually thought of as an advantage. It's rare a wide majority of the electorate ever actually agrees on anything anyway, and tyranny of the majority or government that is too reactive to popular will is also not desirable.
But sometimes things are different, due to external or macro factors as you indicated. Some elections are more consequential than others. That doesn't necessarily mean any one election simply doesn't matter. It's simply good civic hygiene to vote. Think of all the people in red states who vote blue or vice versa in elections they will never win, never mind have their chosen candidate "change things". Does this mean they are fools? I salute them for such a faithful exercise of their civic privileges, that which generations of humans have died for. Your vote doesn't simply lose all value because you didn't get the outcome you wanted. It also doesn't preclude other avenues, like direct action or whatever your supposed alternative is.
It's good to vote simply out of civic obligation. Many people who say otherwise seem to merely be complaining that voting doesn't give anyone 100% of what they want. We've seen more and more "insurgent" candidates take over primaries. Increasingly people who complain about politics strike me as engineers who talk instead of build. Complaining about the effectiveness of your vote is like listening to an engineer who is always talking but never ships.
Like go run a campaign or solve the problem. What does saying voting doesn't matter solve? It feels like middle school age cynicism masquerading as insight. Politics has actually rarely felt so unsettled in America. Voting is likely more important than ever.
Building labor unions is more valuable than voting. I think you should still vote, but understand voting without leverage will result in your candidate bending the knee. An example is Mamdani being elected in NYC, but allowing a known class enemy to run the police.
Yes, this clarification makes sense and more politicians should also make this explicit, as they often end up disappointing voters who think their civic obligations start and end at the ballot box.
A politician who doesn't agitate voters to take direct action in between elections is ultimately one who hopes you really don't pay that much attention to what they are doing. It's always about electioneering or diverting attention elsewhere. It's fine to say voting is merely the bare minimum check on elected officials, as long as you don't encourage anyone to then skip this necessary (albeit preliminary) step.
This clarification is a goal of DSA members. Elected officials should use their position oppositionally and to tell the truth about our system. For example reading government secrets into the public record, telling the public the truth about who is steering various debates in Washington, promoting the nationalization of companies and formation of cooperatives.
Mamdani did do something interesting in this vein recently. When the racists on the right said he couldn't go to a 9/11 memorial, he released documents showing they allowed people to be poisoned in 2001.
Mitterrand did attempt to do the things his voters wanted. He was constrained by capitalists who punished him mercilessly until he bent the knee. Allende was simply couped and assassinated.
Voting changes things when those changes do not substantially threaten elites and they can come to some kind of acceptable deal, or when you have sufficient leverage that when your guy gets in they can steamroll the capitalists.
Leverage isn't "votes", that's just a preference on a piece of paper. Leverage is the ability to materially change reality to reward or punish actions. A strike, granting or witholding financial resources, shutting down infrastructure, armed revolt, etc.
> Leverage isn't "votes", that's just a preference on a piece of paper.
It actually is leverage because those people who get the most votes are in charge of our government.
The government monopoly on violence, controlled by the people who get voted in, is the clear and obvious leverage.
> Mitterrand did attempt to do the things his voters wanted. He was constrained by capitalists who punished him mercilessly until he bent the knee.
Sounds like he didn't get enough of his own people in government then.
If you fail, then it means that you didn't get enough people voted in. Having leverage requires more than just winning a single election. It involves winning many elections and getting widespread support and your people in government.
The attack did not come from inside the government alone. It was for example, capital flight. The rich attempted to starve the French economy to win concessions and they won them.
People that control the government in principle control the guns. People that control the economy hold the real levers of power. You can in principle use guns to get control of the economy, though in practice it is trickier. America has done it on many occasions though, blasting apart democratic governments in South and Central America to install neoliberal puppets.
If a person doesn't like where they live, yes they tend to vote with their feet.
Thats not different than voting. If everyone flees, then that means that your agenda wasn't popular enough and you should get more support. The solution is still the same.
And the idea that just because you win 1 election somewhere in the world means that you get to infinitely enact your agenda is also silly. To fully enact an agenda you need widespread support.
And if your answer to that reality is to start asking question about how to prevent everyone from fleeing, then that almost definitionally means that your proposal don't have enough support.
So the point stands. Yes if you get enough votes you can enact your agenda. That says nothing about avoiding the consequences of your agenda though. You cannot use wish fulfilment and make believe to turn a bad policy into a good one. Yes, you have to suffer the consequences of your bad policies.
And it is not the fault of "The Elite", when people flee from the consequences of bad policy. Instead thats just the policy being enacted as expected.
Timing matters. If the labs succeed here they will likely do so by paying off Trump, who doesn't care.
In 2028 a maximalist case could then be made to nationalize them.
The government actually running them isn't great, but no one ever gets 100% of they want in politics. It's about trafeoffs. If the labs use the current government to pull up the ladder, then the voters should vote for a government to swing hard to punish them.
In theory the threat of this should also act as a deterrent.
There's nothing weird about this at all. Politics is all about push and pull, carrot and stick. No one has permanent influence over affairs, and no one ever gets 100% of what they want. Yet it is entirely coherent to advocate for something like nationalization or take your pick of threat to private capital if they essentially cheat by pulling up the ladder because they've suddenly decided they don't want to compete.
Interesting perspective. I've frequently heard the opposite, and I find this convincing.
Why do you think AI will not be a major political issue in 2028? Perhaps to level set do you think it is a political issue now? Do you expect it to be less politicized in two years? Why?
Well Trump is signalling that he is happy to let AI rip.
Bernie wants there to be an extreme shutdown of AI immediately.
So lets say you had 2 billion dollars of slush and worked for OpenAI and anthropic.
You would immediately start to grease the paws of republicans to support just enough regulation to slow your competitors. And you would start to grease the paws of democrats to push for a "Moderate centrist" position away from Bernie, leading towards Regulation.
Ice Cream Vendor problem leads you straight into both sides supporting the same moderate regulation that OpenAI/Anthropic will write for them.
Keep in mind its going to be a noisy election cycle with Donald Trumps idiot successor vs whatever goofball the democrats vomit up arguing about tariffs, trade partners, healthcare, ICE etc.
Democrat falls out of line "You just want China to beat us at AI"
Republican falls out of line "You are just a techbro supporting epstein affiliate"
Then theres the standard 99% + chance regarding US election promises that people just dont act on it at all.
These frontier labs violate billions of terms of services across the web, that prohibit scraping / automated access / etc. Most sites have a clause, it’s basically standard boilerplate.
There is nothing illegal about training on traces from frontier models.
However the frontier labs don’t have to serve customers who are farming the service for distillation purposes. That’s their choice and they’re free to make it if they detect distillation happening.
I would argue they should have to. They scraped data off others, a lot of whom did not want that data to be used for AI training, and still had to share it with the frontier labs. It’s only fair they should have to hand it back.
The only way US maintains dominance over Chinese models is by having an ecosystem of models. Relying on a small set of frontier labs will only let you get ahead temporarily. I agree with Gary Tan on this one.
Generally companies are welcome to choose to who to provide service to, as long as it's not discriminating against a protected class, or ruled as anticompetitive (which is a very high bar in recent case law; even if the same 1890s-era laws are still on the books).
I don't think a correct remedy is to require companies to provide services even if they want to. A simple example: you drop a client because their asks / ways-of-working / etc is more headache and costs than it's worth. I've done that before, multiple times, in my freelancing life.
>I don't think a correct remedy is to require companies to provide services even if they want to.
(I assume there's a don't missing)
Forced open API access/protocol transparency for tech platforms and a right to client-side consumption, essentially making the server a common carrier would be one of the most elegant and simple ways to effectively destroy every issue internet platforms pose in terms of competitiveness or data ownership without creating endless fault-ridden legislation.
Tech giants aren't freelancers, they deal with billions of interchangeable users and aren't going to succumb to an annoying customer.
Yes, I think this is the main issue. I don't care what policies the AI labs have or enforce, but they need to stop acting like ToS violations are an international crisis demanding intervention instead of a boring civil dispute at most.
"Strip-mine" is not correct. The commons are all still there and you can still train on them just like the frontier labs did. Of course, it may be illegal to do so, but that's not any different than before.
No, these are books that aren't online, which means not only are they not contributing to the commons, they are irrevocably salting the earth (irrevocably because let's be honest, anything going into their archives isn't coming out without legal or actual violence)
Also, permitted or no, they are definitely torrenting. I would be deeply surprised if they hadn't already leeched every torrent on public trackers. The only reason they (probably) haven't depleted all the private trackers too is that they would be required to actually contribute back, which as above is never going to happen.
>irrevocably because let's be honest, anything going into their archives isn't coming
They were torrenting, they were sent to court and settled for big $$$$. The only other method available to them now is scanning, and scanning at scale requires the books destruction.
I agree that they should definitely be required to see the new scans but that would just be more $$$$ they get charged if caught.
> I love the "illicit distillation attacks" framing from the incumbents. There's nothing illicit. There's no attack. You just don't like it because it threatens your market position and business model.
I think a lot of this is done using stolen black market API credentials, which is why it might be somewhat accurate to consider it illicit.
Morally I agree, but since there's probably a lot of LLM text in the training data, distilling on another model will probably make your model copy the values encoded into the other model as well, even in cases where you only distill on value-neutral stuff.
By copying their programming style, you'll move the model towards that way of writing, which will move the model towards the values expressed in those documents.
I feel that Deepseek v4 got so claudified at the end that it was like Claude.
There's no moral high ground here, it's just that nobody would invest in training publicly usable models if they could be easily distilled. Not that I think there should be laws against it or that such laws would even work; they're going to have to protect themselves.
Fewer people would create scientific or artistic works if they could just be copied or used without protection either; or so is the premise behind copyright and intellectual property; even being deeply embedded into the US Constitution (Art 1, Sec 8, Clause 8).
I agree. Some existing licenses don't seem compatible with AI training. If they don't go back to rectify that, at the very least you should be able to license your work in a way that explicitly prohibits AI training. They can pay if they want to use it.
> it's just that nobody would invest in training publicly usable models if they could be easily distilled.
Thats literally what is happening right now though. People are spending hundreds of millions on a training run, and then people are distilling them, fairly easily, and making cost competitive models.
All correct, just help me get over the idea of an open-weight Mythos where one or a dozen of us eight billion does something stupid on the bioweapon front. Smart people who’ve exhausted possibilities for what they can do with books and web search and today’s Kimi/GLM.
Figure we’ll have to reckon with this next year in any case, guess we’ll see.
You dont need an LLM to figure out to make anthrax. Anybody who can figure out how to make a home lab can make all sorts of dangerous stuff pretty easily. Same with college grad from a respectable chemistry program. This all FUD.
This is our generation's "Saddam has WMDs". It's something the big labs thought up when they were trying to figure out how to make their product sound scary enough to deserve regulation. Literally no one is doing this or even trying, anyone who would want to do it would have already done it. Not worried about it.
> He also notes that the proprietary AI labs didn’t ask permission when they vacuumed up as much human knowledge as they could to train their models. They famously ingested plenty of copyrighted material without the permission of those intellectual property holders.
And many people's shared opinion (B):
>> I don't expect Tan's position to be based on any kind of real moral high ground, but his conclusion is correct.
...
It is very difficult to actually say NO to the fact that (A) was done, which then leads logically to conclusions as (B). But also we should remember that if these two hold (and (A) is an axiom more or less now), then it comes as no surprise that then also all opensource licensing is immediately rendered void and null, as keeping it would contradict (A) and would go against the very common and consequential logic in (B).
Copyright is so dead. And it was not me killing it with a cynical post on HN. Dunno why so many people still fail to face it. There is no way it can exist in its current form, because then immediately (A) happens and (B) follows.
>I love the "illicit distillation attacks" framing from the incumbents. There's nothing illicit. There's no attack. You just don't like it because it threatens your market position and business model.
With what knowledge are you claiming this? If it turns out companies are using IP proxy networks would you change your mind?
What if the IP Proxy networks were used by criminals for similar attacks like DDoS or plain cyber attacks?
What if the source of the IP proxy networks were residential addresses to avoid detection?
What if the way these IPs were acquired were through pwned devices?
What if the credit cards used do not identify the company that carries the attack? What if they use the employee's personal credit cards? What if it's family members of employees? What if it's a network of personal credit cards where cc owners get a payment for making a purchase on their name? What if they are stolen ccs?
Not just a hypothetical btw, I believe almost all of these are true.
You can't just throw in "or what if they're stolen credit cards" at the end to lump in blatantly illegal/unethical activity with the far weaker preceding points that can be summarized as "uses a residential proxy".
I don't expect Tan's position to be based on any kind of real moral high ground, but his conclusion is correct.
I love the "illicit distillation attacks" framing from the incumbents. There's nothing illicit. There's no attack. You just don't like it because it threatens your market position and business model.