It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
>It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up
Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data.
With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that, and they would definitely not give it back for free.
I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing. Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only think I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".
We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.
Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves. I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.
>companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves
No, but why should we accept they get away with it? Also Microsoft has definitely sued people for pirating windows and now collaborates with OpenAI and uses their ai trained on stolen materials.
Culture robbery is not limited to AI. Any big concert for example is capitalismed to hell. So are neighborhoods. Where you used to have people just living, now you have an intentionally designed facade for people to live within. There was a comment on the 40C3 thread saying it's got too capitalist because of the ticket cost, and idk about that because it's always been hosted in commercial venues to my knowledge, but the vibe of the conference and the club itself are much less rebel than they used to be. Stuff like Burning Man now exists for people like Elon to go there and say "I was at Burning Man" and for people to get T-shirts saying "I was at Burning Man" and photos of themselves being at Burning Man more than for whatever the first few ones were about.
> With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that
Well, with some imagination, you can have regulation that forces companies to open up, not just close down.
Imagine a law that stipulates that if you want to offer "LLM-inference-as-a-service", you need to also publish exact details about how it was trained, what datasets were used and also offer those exact weights for download.
Sure, this would never happen, but just offering another perspective on how laws and regulation can be used if it was wanted, locking stuff down and pulling up the ladder behind you isn't the only way to use laws, although that is a very popular reason and approach.
Every time you're writing software or building machines/factories (which is automating things), you are committing a crime. Every time you learn from your superiors or colleagues, get better than them, get promotion or they get fired, you are committing a crime. Provide justice there first.
Has it affected DD as deeply as it as affected software engineering? Guessing clients feel a lot more "empowered" or "independent" and knowledgeable these days? I liked doing DD, just as much as I enjoyed developing, but it must be dying a slow death too. What's changed in how DD reports are produced?
Nit: Please don’t use obscure acronyms when writing things to an international audience without defining them first… DD can mean so many different things
Go do something about actual evil shit like arms and bombs manufacturers and the politicians causing the deaths of millions from the comfort of their sofas.
At this point in our civilization, all human knowledge NEEDS to be collated in one place and easily queryable. Otherwise it's just too damn difficult to make any further progress; there's just damn too much shit to learn.
How much do the current LLMs invent solutions for user tasks, how much they just copy and adopt existing open-source solutions from from Github and other code repositories?
This not a problem for open-source code under permissive software license, but works derived from open-source code with copyleft software license should be also under copyleft license.
Could the biggest commercial benefit of LLMs be just working around limitations of copyleft licenses?
What is the monetary value of human work put into copyleft software and later used to train LLMs? It's hard to estimate, but the study "Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution", estimated that it would cost $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone.
They do invent code solution for the problem that exists in your codebase. Latter implies that the code solution LLM synthesizes is usually unique of a kind, so, it's not a copy-paste neither it is a simple extract from "another codebase" but adopted.
IMO they operate pretty similarly to humans - we synthesize our solutions, and therefore build-up our knowledge, by collecting knowledge from multiple other sources, including technical books and blogs, open-source code repositories, and our past experiences.
I understand the sentiment and partly agree. But also, the original has not gone anywhere. You're free to accumulate knowledge in the old way just as before. So maybe it's not theft of knowledge that we should be angry about, it's something else harder to define.
If corporations weren't already owning the consumer, with AI it does this by many orders of magnitude. If something isn't done to prevent AI from being used to farm the masses for data, we will be living in a sci-fi dystopia without a doubt.
Well… Marx would say “theft of labor” is fundamental for the capitalist system to operate. The sin is when you “steal” from the capitalists. That’s why you can’t distill from a commercial model.
It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
>It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up
Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data.
With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that, and they would definitely not give it back for free. I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing. Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only think I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".
We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.
Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves. I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.
>companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves
really not the same entities here
No, but why should we accept they get away with it? Also Microsoft has definitely sued people for pirating windows and now collaborates with OpenAI and uses their ai trained on stolen materials.
Yeah that's more fair
Not at leaf level, but if you trace the trunk, pretty sure you end up on the same one.
Culture robbery is not limited to AI. Any big concert for example is capitalismed to hell. So are neighborhoods. Where you used to have people just living, now you have an intentionally designed facade for people to live within. There was a comment on the 40C3 thread saying it's got too capitalist because of the ticket cost, and idk about that because it's always been hosted in commercial venues to my knowledge, but the vibe of the conference and the club itself are much less rebel than they used to be. Stuff like Burning Man now exists for people like Elon to go there and say "I was at Burning Man" and for people to get T-shirts saying "I was at Burning Man" and photos of themselves being at Burning Man more than for whatever the first few ones were about.
> With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that
Well, with some imagination, you can have regulation that forces companies to open up, not just close down.
Imagine a law that stipulates that if you want to offer "LLM-inference-as-a-service", you need to also publish exact details about how it was trained, what datasets were used and also offer those exact weights for download.
Sure, this would never happen, but just offering another perspective on how laws and regulation can be used if it was wanted, locking stuff down and pulling up the ladder behind you isn't the only way to use laws, although that is a very popular reason and approach.
Every time you're writing software or building machines/factories (which is automating things), you are committing a crime. Every time you learn from your superiors or colleagues, get better than them, get promotion or they get fired, you are committing a crime. Provide justice there first.
Has it affected DD as deeply as it as affected software engineering? Guessing clients feel a lot more "empowered" or "independent" and knowledgeable these days? I liked doing DD, just as much as I enjoyed developing, but it must be dying a slow death too. What's changed in how DD reports are produced?
What is DD supposed to mean?
Nit: Please don’t use obscure acronyms when writing things to an international audience without defining them first… DD can mean so many different things
At least the Chinese AI companies are doing good service open-sourcing their models back to the public.
There are no open-source LLMs.
> sell it back to us at a mark-up.
What if it was for free, like Wikipedia?
> Crimes this large are crimes against humanity.
JFC no, sit down.
Go do something about actual evil shit like arms and bombs manufacturers and the politicians causing the deaths of millions from the comfort of their sofas.
At this point in our civilization, all human knowledge NEEDS to be collated in one place and easily queryable. Otherwise it's just too damn difficult to make any further progress; there's just damn too much shit to learn.
In case of programming.
How much do the current LLMs invent solutions for user tasks, how much they just copy and adopt existing open-source solutions from from Github and other code repositories?
This not a problem for open-source code under permissive software license, but works derived from open-source code with copyleft software license should be also under copyleft license.
Could the biggest commercial benefit of LLMs be just working around limitations of copyleft licenses?
What is the monetary value of human work put into copyleft software and later used to train LLMs? It's hard to estimate, but the study "Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution", estimated that it would cost $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone.
https://consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/estimating-the-total-...
They do invent code solution for the problem that exists in your codebase. Latter implies that the code solution LLM synthesizes is usually unique of a kind, so, it's not a copy-paste neither it is a simple extract from "another codebase" but adopted.
IMO they operate pretty similarly to humans - we synthesize our solutions, and therefore build-up our knowledge, by collecting knowledge from multiple other sources, including technical books and blogs, open-source code repositories, and our past experiences.
If someone asked what is 'the largest theft of labor in human history' I would have thought slavery.
Never ended, just changed in form.
I understand the sentiment and partly agree. But also, the original has not gone anywhere. You're free to accumulate knowledge in the old way just as before. So maybe it's not theft of knowledge that we should be angry about, it's something else harder to define.
Lots of the original content is no longer available. Bots kill sites, AI kills monetization - both results in the original material disappearing.
I think it’s more like ‘The absolute maximum possible degree of theft’ there can’t be larger, it’s everything current and past.
I remember techchrunch.com making the argument that IP Infringment != Theft in the music piracy era.. how quickly the tide turns :)
they did say theft of labor, not theft of the things being trained on
If corporations weren't already owning the consumer, with AI it does this by many orders of magnitude. If something isn't done to prevent AI from being used to farm the masses for data, we will be living in a sci-fi dystopia without a doubt.
And here we are, just watching and doing nothing..
Well… Marx would say “theft of labor” is fundamental for the capitalist system to operate. The sin is when you “steal” from the capitalists. That’s why you can’t distill from a commercial model.