Apparently the above has been marked as a dupe (I hope not from a misunderstanding of what "adjacent" means), but ftr it covers different stuff. e.g. there's nothing about the classified data model proposal in TFA
Slightly different coverage of the same event usually count as dupes on HN. You could link the reporting you want to emphasize/discuss, the HN submission itself is not that important.
You see, American AI is going to take over the world. It's just that it's temporarily short of funds. I mean, GPUs. Uh, there are pesky laws in the way.
Totally not the fault of a gigantic overcommitment based on wishing, no.
I hate this game. I hate that Sam Altman publicly supported Trump (both financially and by showing up). Maybe I hate that he "had" to do this for the sake of his company, or maybe I hate that he _didn't_ have to do it and is a hypocrite. Maybe I just hate how easily laws can be shaped by $1M and a few nice words. Either way, I hate that it worked.
I heard rumblings about some sort of system where power is shared equally across three branches of government with checks and balances to ensure one branch doesn't go rogue and just do whatever they want.
Forget what they called it, united something or other.
Well, the people who designed that system were very skeptical of political parties in general, and thought they could be avoided. Turns out that this isn't true, and once you have parties, they can in fact capture all three branches of government, and then those "checks and balances" kinda stop working.
In fact, that's not too far away from our current trajectory. Algorithmically enforced sovereign oversight is part of the patchwork state and Yarvinism specifically.
Centralizing production goals, decision making, and expenditure at the Federal government is what made the industrial response to WW2 successful. Centralizing tax revenue to fund retirements for the elderly (Social Security) resulted in the poverty rate of seniors being brought far lower. Centralizing zoning control at the state of California is _finally_ starting to make localities take responsibility for building more housing. These were/are centralizing efforts with the intent of helping the masses over the wealthy few.
What doesn't work is centralizing power with the intent of concentrating wealth and security by taking wealth, labor, and security from working people, AKA extractive institutions.
That's true whether it's the donor-class funded political establishment or regimes like the current US kleptocracy doing it.
Problem is, once you centralize, that remains in place for a long time, but the original intent, even if it was genuine, rarely outlives the people who implemented it for long.
Generally speaking, every point of centralization is also a point where a lot of power can be acquired with relatively little resources. So regardless of intent, it attracts people who are into power, and over time, they take over. The original intent often remains symbolically and in the rhetoric used, but when you look beyond that into the actual policies, they are increasingly divorced from what is actually claimed.
> Generally speaking, every point of centralization is also a point where a lot of power can be acquired with relatively little resources
This is why (1) shared principles and (2) credible democracy is important, to allow evolution of the centralized power (i.e. government) towards the shared principles, and why its corporate-bribed facsimile or oligarchic authoritarianism don't work.
Credibility of democracy breaks down as you scale upward (which you have to do if you want to centralize). Any representative democracy in which the representative doesn't know all the people they represent is already suspect, but when you get to the point where a single guy supposedly represents hundreds of thousands or even millions, it's kinda obvious that there's no meaningful representation involved. The only way to avoid that is to grow the parliament instead to the point where it ceases to function as a deliberative assembly (and then what's the point of it?).
Or you can have a bunch of smaller assemblies that actually are representative, and then a larger one to which assemblies delegate their own to cooperate. But that's exactly political decentralization - a multi-level federation.
I think it can work for a short period of time if you have enlightened leaders or if the political machine wants to please you; they always alternate pleasing some people and upsetting others so that they can keep control.
Over a long period of time the interest of the powerful will always win. There is a reason if no government (whether left or right) can fix the situation and inequality between the top 0.01% and the rest keeps increasing.
The only solution to maximise wellbeing for individuals is to reduce the amount of control the powerful can exert on the rest of society.
I don't think someone with more capital should be able to make the decisions
That's what we're getting with "democracy" because ultimately swaying the opinion of a lot of people (in this technological time) requires money. No wonder the powerful elite or their puppets end up making decision for the majority.
No, what I advocate for is for decentralisation of power, I don't want any central entity making choices for me.
Someone with capital should be able to offer to buy me out but they shouldn't be able to tax me or decide what happens to me or my property.
This is tech. This is how it has always been. From Archemedes to DaVinci to Edison to Ford, technologists are always captured to serve the interests of those in power. Most modern technologists don't want to believe this. They grew up building an Internet that had a bit of countercultural flair to it and undermined a few subsets of entrenched elites (mass media, taxi cartels, etc.), so they convinced themselves that they could control society under their wise hands. Except the same thing that always happened happened: the powers that be are now treating tech the way tech treats everyone else.
Wealth of Nations (read past pg 50, unlike most current economists)
Das kapital, as a critique to Smith's writing.
Communist manifesto, to understand the point of the laborer, and not capital.
Read about worker cooperatives and democracy in the workplace, including Mondragon corp in Spain.
(One of the largest problems we have with any economic system is that none can properly model infinites. The cost of creating new is expensive be it art or science. But cost of copying is effectively 0. I can highlight the problem, but I have no good solution. But OpenAI's response is 'let us ignore copyright law' which wrongs creators.)
It made sense to ponder given HN attracts people with the hacker mindset (the drive of curiosity to understand how things work and how to improve them, not merely accepting the status quo as gospel like the dry monkeys) and frustration is a good signal that something could be improved.
>> In the proposal, OpenAI also said the U.S. needs “a copyright strategy that promotes the freedom to learn” and on “preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.”
Perhaps also symmetric "freedom to learn" from OpenAI models, with some provisions / naming convention? U.S. labs are limited in this way, while labs in China are not.
It already applies to real people, doesn't it? I.e. if you read a book, you're not allowed to start printing and selling copies of that book without permission of the copyright owner, but if you learn something from that book you can use that knowledge, just like a model could.
when it comes to real people, they get sued into oblivion for downloading copyrighted content, even for the purpose of learning.
but when facebook & openai do it, at a much larger scale, suddenly the laws must be changed.
Swartz wasn’t “downloading copyrighted content…for the purpose of learning,” he was downloading with the intent to distribute. That doesn’t justify how he was treated. But it’s not analogous to the limited argument for LLMs that don’t regurgitate the copyrighted content.
> when it comes to real people, they get sued into oblivion for downloading copyrighted content, even for the purpose of learning.
Really? Or do they get sued for sharing as in republishing without transformation? Arguably a URL providing copyrighted content, is you offering a xerox machine.
It seems most "sued into oblivion" are the reshare problem, not the get one for myself problem.
This is not about memory or training. The LLM training process is not being run on books streamed directly off the internet or from real-time footage of a book.
What these companies are doing is:
1. Obtain a free copy of a work in some way.
2. Store this copy in a format that's amenable to training.
3. Train their models on the stored copy, months or years after step 1 happened.
The illegal part happens in steps 1 and/or 2. Step 3 is perhaps debatable - maybe it's fair to argue that the model is learning in the same sense as a human reading a book, so the model is perhaps not illegally created.
But the training set that the company is storing is full of illegally obtained or at least illegally copied works.
What they're doing before the training step is exactly like building a library by going with a portable copier into bookshops and creating copies of every book in that bookshop.
But making copies for yourself, without distributing them, is different than making copies for others. Google is downloading copyrighted content from everywhere online, but they don't redistribute their scraped content.
Even web browsing implies making copies of copyrighted pages, we can't tell the copyright status of a page without loading it, at which point a copy has been made in memory.
Making copies of an original you don't own/didn't obtain legally is not fair use. Also, this type of personal copying doesn't apply to corporations making copies to be distributed among their employees (it might apply to a company making a copy for archival, though).
Can I download a book without paying for it, and print copies of it? Stash copies in my bathroom, the gym, my office, my bedroom etc. to basically have a copy on hand to study from whenever I have some free time?
> Can I download a book without paying for it, and print copies of it?
No, but you can read a book, learn its contents, and then write and publish your own book to teach the information to others. The operation of an AI is rather closer to that than it is to copyright violation.
"Should" there be protections against AI training? Maybe! But copyright law as it stands is woefully inadequate to the task, and IMHO a lot of people aren't really treating with this. We need a functioning government to write well-considered laws for the benefit of all here. We'll see what we get.
Yes, but the learning isn't constrained by those laws. If I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime of theft. You can put me in jail, try me before a jury, fine me, and put me in prison according to whatever laws I broke.
Nothing in my sentence constrains my ability to teach someone else the stuff I learned, though! In fact, the first amendment makes it pretty damn clear that nothing can constrain that freedom.
Also, note that the example is malformed: in almost all these cases, Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway. They're downloading and reading stuff on the internet that is available for free. If you or I can't be prosecuted for reading a preprint from arXiv.org or whatever, it's a very hard case to make that an AI can.
Again, copyright isn't the tool here. We need better laws.
Sure, but OpenAI (same as Google, and Facebook, and all the others) is illegally copying the book, and they want this to be legal for them.
It's perhaps arguable whether it's OK for an LLM to be trained on freely available but licensed works, such as the Linux source code. There you can get in arguments about learning vs machine processing, and whether the LLM is a derived work etc
But it's not arguable that copying a book that you have not even bought to store in your corporate data lake to later use for training is a blatant violation of basic copyright. It's exactly like borrowing a book from a library, photocopying it, and then putting it in your employee-only corporate library.
One thing is downloading pirated copy and reading it for yourself and another thing is running a business based on downloading millions of pirated works.
Yes, but this is not the right model. What OpenAI wants is to borrow a book, make a copy of it, and keep using that copy, in training their models. This is fully and simply illegal, under any basic copyright law.
Let's say Windows is downloadable from Microsoft website. Can you use it for free in your company to save on buying a license? Is it ok to use illegal copies of works in a business?
if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers would absolutely love to hear about it.
We know Meta has done it. These companies have torrented or downloaded books that they did not pay for. Things like the The Pile, libgen, anna's library were scraped to build these models.
>if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers would absolutely love to hear about it.
To the extent that this is how libraries function, yes.
The part of that which doesn't apply is "print copies", at least not complete copies, but libraries often have photocopiers in them for fragments needed for research.
AI models shouldn't do that either, IMO. But unlimited complete copies is the mistake the Internet Archive made, too.
I don't need a card to read in the library, nor to use the photocopiers there, but it's merely one example anyway. (If it wasn't, you'd only need one library, any of the deposit libraries will do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit).
You also don't need permission, as a human, to read (and learn from) the internet in general. Machines by standard practice require such permission, hence robots.txt, and OpenAI's GPTBot complies with the robots.txt file and the company gives advice to web operators about how to disallow their bot.
How AI should be treated, more like a search index, or more like a mind that can learn by reading? Not my call. It's a new thing, and laws can be driven by economics or by moral outrage, and in this case those two driving forces are at odds.
How so? I don't have to pay to read most websites. To read most books I have to pay (or a library has to pay and I have to wait to get the book).
> IIRC, Google already did your sidenote
Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and have humans feed them into scanners. I'm talking about a robot that can walk (or roll) into a library, use arms to take books off the shelves, turn the pages and read them without putting them into a scanner.
They had humans turn the pages of intact books in scanning machines. The books mostly came from the shelves of academic libraries and were returned to the shelves after scanning. You can see some incidental captures of hands/fingers in the scans on Google Books or HathiTrust (the academic home of the Google Books scans). There are some examples collected here:
Fact is, you can read books for free, just as you can read (many but not all) websites for free. And in both cases you're allowed to use what you learned without paying ongoing licensing fees for having learned anything from either, and even to make money from what you learn.
> Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and have humans feed them into scanners.
I missed the part where we throw away rational logic skills
Have you never been to a public library and read a book while sitting there without checking it out? Clearly, age is a factor here, and us olds are confused by this lack of understanding of how libraries function. I did my entire term paper without ever checking out books from the library. I just showed up with my stack of blank index cards, then left with the necessary info written on them. Did an entire project on tracking stocks by visiting the library and viewing all of the papers for the days in one sitting rather than being schmuck and tracking it daily. Took me about an hour in one day. No library card required.
Also, a library card is ridiculously cheap even if you did decide to have one.
If I spent every last second of my life in a public library, I couldn't even view a fraction of the information that OpenAI has ingested. The comparison is irrelevant. To make the comparison somehow valid, I'd have to back up my truck to a public library, steal the entire contents, then start selling copies out of my garage
Look, even I'm not a fan of ClosedAI, but this is ridiculous. ClosedAI isn't giving copies of anything. It is giving you a response it infers based on things it has "read" and/or "learned" by reading content. Does ClosedAI store a copy of the content it scrapes, or does it immediately start tokenizing it or whatever is involved in training? If they store it, that's a lot of data, and we should be able to prove that sites were scraped through lawsuit discovery process. Are you then also suggesting that ClosedAI will sell you copies of that raw data if you prompted correctly?
I'm in no way justifying anything about GPT/LLM training. I'm just calling out that these comparisons are extremely strained.
Let's say OpenAI developers use illegal copy of Windows on their laptops to save on buying a license. Is that ok to run a business this way?
Also I think it is different thing when someone uses copyrighted works for research and publishing a paper or when someone uses copyrighted works to earn money.
> Have you never been to a public library and read a book while sitting there without checking it out?
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355723. If OpenAI built a robot that physically went into libraries, pulled books off shelves by itself, and read them...that's so cool I wouldn't even be mad.
What about checking out eBooks? If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it at robot speed vs human feed, that would be the same thing. The idea that reading something that does not belong to you directly means stealing is just weird and very strained.
theGoogs essentially did that by having the robot that turned each page and scanned the pages. that's no different than having the librarian pull material for you so that you don't have to pull the book from the shelf yourself.
There's better arguments to make on why ClosedAI is bad. Reading text it doesn't own isn't one of them. How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique. There's laws for that in place now that does not require new laws to be enacted.
> You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem?
In precisely the same way as a robot scanning a physical book is.
If this is turned into a PDF and distributed, it's exactly the legal problem Google had[0] and that Facebook is currently fighting due to torrenting some of their training material[1].
If the tokens go directly into training an AI and no copies are retained, that's like how you as a human learn — except current AI models are not even remotely as able to absorb that information as you, and they only make up for being as thick as a plank by being stupid very very quickly.
> It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read the books, and us humans are not.
More that the copyright laws are not suited to what's going on. Under the copyright laws, statute and case law, that existed at the time GPT-3.5 was created, bots were understood as the kind of thing Google had and used to make web indexes — essentially legal, with some caveats about quoting too much verbatim from news articles.
(Google PageRank being a big pile of linear algebra and all, and the Transformer architecture from which ChatGPT get's the "T" being originally a Google effort to improve Google Translate).
Society is currently arguing amongst itself if this is still OK when the bot is a conversational entity, or perhaps even something that can be given agency.
You get to set those rules via your government representative, make it illegal for AI crawlers to read the internet like that — but it's hard to change the laws if you mistake what you want the law to be, with what the law currently is.
but you keep saying to read the books. there is no copyright violation to read a book. making copies starts to get into murky grounds, but does not immediately mean breaking the law.
Yes, you're allowed to make personal copies of copyright works that you own. IANAL, but my understanding is that if you're using them for yourself, and you're not prevented from doing so by some sort of EULA or DRM, there's nothing in copyright law preventing you from e.g. photocopying a book and keeping a copy at home, as long as you don't distribute it. The test case here has always been CDs—you're allowed to make copies of CDs you legally own and keep one at home and one in your car.
You're repeating upthread comments. And no, you can't. There's an archival exception for electronic media. If you want to make copies of physical media you either:
1. Can't
Or
2. Rely on fair use to protect you (archival by individuals isn't necessarily fair use)
It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your personal archives.
The fair use criteria considers whether it is commercial in nature (in this case it is not) and the “ the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work” for which a personal copy of a personally owned book is non existent.
> the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
A copyright holder's lawyer would argue that having and using a photocopy of a book keeps the original from wearing out. This directly affects the potential market for the work, since the owner could resell the book in mint condition, after reading and burning their photocopies.
> You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep.
I mean maybe this is true. But the affected individual will have a very bad year and spend a ton of money on lawyers.
Why do you interpret this to mean "absolutely can't do this"? "No precedent" seems to equally support both sides of the argument (that is, it provides no evidence; courts have not ruled). The other commenters arguments on the actual text of the statute seem more convincing to me than what you have so far provided.
> The other commenters arguments...seem more convincing
Because you (and I) want it to be fair use. But as I already said in my comment, it potentially fails one leg of fair use. Keeping your purchased physical copy of the book pristine and untouched while you read the photocopy allows you to later, after destroying the copies you made, resell the book as new or like-new. This directly affects the market for that book.
Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out if it's really fair use? That's what "no precedent" means.
> Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out if it's really fair use?
No. I'd much rather pirate the epub followed by lobbying for severe IP law reform. (Of course by "lobby" I actually mean complain about IP law online.)
Multiple times in this thread you make the very confident assertion that this is not allowed, and that it is only allowed for electronic media. That is your opinion, which is fine. The argument that it is fair use is also an opinion. Until it becomes settled law with precedent, every argument about it will just opinion on what the text of the law means. But you are denigrating the other opinions while upholding your own as truth.
And whether or not I am personally interested in testing any of these opinions is completely beside the point.
Copyright is a restriction on making unauthorized, full copies under almost all circumstances. Default deny. There's only one documented exception on the books right now which is electronic media. None of these are opinions.
The idea that photocopying a book for archival purposes is potentially fair use is an untested opinion. I'm not denigrating that opinion. I just think it's likely to fail as an legal argument in the unlikely event that it comes up. I'm not a copyright apologist.
I myself believed the "fair use for archival"/"format shifting" thing applied to all works for most of my life. I only learned there was no law or precedent like 10 days ago.
You’re now arguing the assumption without a precedent you don’t have the right to do something. That’s not how the law works. If you believe that the courts would laugh at a publisher trying to bring suit against you for doing this, then you believe you have the right to do it.
Such a case would not require a year or a ton of money to defend. In fact, the potential damages would be so small that you could sensibly do it in small claims court.
> You’re now arguing the assumption without a precedent you don’t have the right to do something. That’s not how the law works.
I mean copyright law has always been "You can't make full copies for any reason (almost)". And you were the one saying "it absolutely is fair use [to make full personal copies]", which is quite a strong statement to make in the absence of a precedence.
An archive could argue fair use to make full copies of physical works, because that's their role, and by keeping the copies locked away they don't harm the market for the works. These fair use factors don't apply to individuals. But IANAL and maybe that's wrong, who knows? I do know if it comes up the copyright mafia will fight it tooth and nail, and I'd put my money on them winning.
> the potential damages would be so small that you could sensibly do it in small claims court
The publisher would sue the infringer in small claims court? This seems very unlikely since the publisher would prefer to scare or bankrupt you into submission.
Or would the defendant have the lawsuit moved to small claims court? Are defendants allowed to do this?
It seems reasonably within the bounds described by fair use, but nobody's ever tested that particular constellation of factors in a lawsuit, so there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is.
17 U.S.C. § 107 is the fair use carveout.
Interestingly, digitizing and copying a book on your own, for your own private use, has also not been brought to court. Major rights holders seem to not want this particular fair use precedent to be established, which it likely would be, and might then invalidate crucial standing for other cases in which certain interpretations of fair use are preferred.
Digitally copying media you own is fair use. I'll die on that hill.
It doesn't grant commercial rights, you can't resell a copy as if it were the original, and so on, and so forth.
There's even a good case to be made that sharing a digitally copied work purchased legally, even to millions of people, 5 years after a book is first sold - for a vast majority of books, after 5 years, they've sold about 99.99% of the copies they're going to sell.
By sharing after the ~5 year mark, you're arguably doing marketing for the book, and if we cultivated a culture of direct donation to authors and content creators, it invalidates any of the reasons piracy is made illegal in the first place.
Right now publishers, studios, and platforms have a stranglehold on content markets, and the law serves them almost exclusively. It is exceedingly rare for the law to be invoked in defending or supporting an author or artist directly. It's very common for groups of wealthy lawyers LARPing as protectors of authors and artists to exploit the law and steal money from regular people.
Exclusively digital content should have a 3 year protected period, while physical works should get 5, whether it's text, audio, image, or video.
Once something is outside the protected period, it should be considered fair game for sharing until 20 years have passed, at which point it should enter public domain.
Copyright law serves two purposes - protecting and incentivizing content creators, and serving the interests of the public. Situations where a bunch of lawyers get rich by suing the pants off of regular people over technicalities is a despicable outcome.
> there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is
Thank you! I had looked this up myself last week, so I knew this. I had long believed, as GP does, that copying anything you own without distribution is either allowed or fair use. I wanted GP to learn as I did.
For reference, here's the US legal code in question:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
The spirit seems apparent, but in practice it's been used by awful people to destroy lives and exploit rent from artists and authors in damn near tyrannical ways.
Except you said "You can't make archival copies." and didn't provide a citation. That's quite a different claim than "there exists no precedent clearly establishing your right or lack thereof to make archival copies".
Congress expressly granted archival rights for digital media. If they wanted to do the same for books they could've done so. There's no law or legal precedent allowing it.
Given all this "can't do it" is more probably accurate than "can do it". IANAL but it's not like the question is finely balanced on a knife's edge and could go either way.
Congress didn't explicitly disallow it either. You left that bit out. As such it comes down to interpretation of the existing law. We both clearly agree that doesn't (yet) exist.
> IANAL but it's not like the question is finely balanced on a knife's edge and could go either way.
I agree, but my interpretation is opposite yours. It seems fairly obvious to me that the spirit of the law permits personal copies. That also seems to be in line with (explicitly legislated) digital practices.
But at the end of the day the only clearly correct statement on the matter is "there's no precedent, so we don't know". I suppose it's also generally good advice to avoid the legal quagmire if possible. Being in the right is unlikely to do you any good if it bankrupts you in the process.
That's the whole point of copyright: only the owner of a copyright has the right to make copies. I don't see how it can be more explicit than that. It's a default-deny policy.
There is an archival exception for digital media, so obviously Congress is open to granting exceptions for backup purposes. They chose not to include physical media in this exception.
> only the owner of a copyright has the right to make copies.
You are conveniently omitting the provisions about fair use, which is strange since you're clearly aware of them. The only things copyright is reasonably unambiguous about are sale and distribution. Even then there's lots of grey areas such as performance rights.
You are arguing that something is obviously disallowed but have nothing but your own interpretation to back that up. If the situation was as clear cut as you're trying to make out then where is the precedent showing that personal use archival copies of physical goods are not permitted?
> They chose not to include physical media in this exception.
That's irrelevant to the current discussion, though I'm fairly certain you realize that. Congress declined to weigh in on the matter which (as you clearly know) leaves it up to the courts to interpret the existing law.
> That's irrelevant to the current discussion, though I'm fairly certain you realize that.
I said it because it was relevant.
> where is the precedent showing that personal use archival copies of physical goods are not permitted
> Congress declined to weigh in on the matter
There was no "matter" to "weigh in on". The answer to "Can you make a full, complete copy of a copyrighted work without authorization?" has been "Almost always no" from the beginning of copyright. Even the term "fair use" arose in a US legal precedent over a century after the first copyright laws in England. It became an actual part of US copyright law in the 1970s, less than 50 years ago.
"Fair use" is plausible for a library or archive to make full copies, and keep them safe and archived, since that's their job.
Fair use isn't why we have archival rights for electronic media. That right was written into the law after electronic media became a thing.
In my comment above I gave one example why "fair use" wouldn't work for archival copies of physical media made by individuals. An actual lawyer who's paid by the copyright mafia to care about this stuff can surely find more and stronger reasons.
FWIW someone in another comment pointed out Australian copyright law allows making a copy of books, newspapers, and periodicals for personal, domestic use. Which means: a) it can be done and b) even they had to spell it out specifically
> which (as you clearly know) leaves it up to the courts to interpret the existing law.
This is a specific exception in Australia Copyright law. It allows reproducing works in books, newspapers and periodical publications in different form for private and domestic use.
At home? Without ever sharing it with anyone? I thought making backups of things that you personally own was protected, at least in the US. Could you elaborate on my apparent misunderstanding?
> Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal argument or case law to support that.
Quite the opposite. The burden of proof is on you to show a single person ever, in history, who has been prosecuted for that.
If nobody in the world has ever been prosecuted for this, then that means it is either legal, or it is something else that is so effectively equivalent to "legal" that there is little point in using a different word.
If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its legal, technically!"
Then I guess go ahead. But for those in the real world, those two things are almost equivalent.
> If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its legal, technically!"
To the best of my knowledge, no individual has ever been sued or prosecuted specifically for downloading books. As long as you're not massively sharing them with others, it's not an issue in practice. Enjoy your reading and learning.
Aaron Swartz, cofounder of Reddit and inventor of RSS and Markdown, was hounded to death by an overzealous prosecutor for downloading articles from JSTOR, with the intent to learn from them. He was charged with over a million dollars in fines and could have faced 35 years in prison.
He and Sam Altman were in the same YC class. OpenAI is doing the same thing at a larger scale, and their technology actually reproduces and distributes copyrighted material. It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.
It was overzealous prosecution of the breaking into a closet to wire up some ethernet cables to gain access to the materials
Not the downloading with intent
And apparently the most controversial take on this community is the observation that many people would have done the trial, plea and time, regardless of how overzealous the prosecution was
I'm glad you still have that much faith in the system. That's much more faith than I have in the system (and more faith than I had in the system back then, too).
> It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.
Scraping the Internet is generally very different from piracy. You are given a limited right to that data when you access it, and you can make local copies. if further use does something sufficiently non-copying, then creator rights aren't being infringed.
> Can you compress the internet including copyrighted material and then sell access to it?
Define access?
If you mean sending out the compressed copy, generally no. For things people normally call compression.
If you want to run a search engine, then you should be fine.
> At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes infringement?
It would have to be very very lossy.
But some AI stuff is. For example there are image models with fewer parameters than source images. Those are, by and large, not able to store enough data to infringe with. (Copying can creep in with images that have multiple versions, but that's a small sliver of the data.)
Commercial audio generation models were caught reproducing parts of copyrighted music in a distorted and low-quality form. This is not "learning", just "imitating".
Also, as I understand they didn't even buy the CDs with music for training; they got it somewhere else. Why do organizations that prosecute people for downloading a movie do not want to look if it is ok to make a business on illegal copies of copyrighted works?
When you identify where the infringing party has stored the source material in their artifact.{zip,pdf,safetensor,connectome,etc}. In ML, this discovery stage is called "mechanistic interpretability", and in humans it's called "illegal."
It's not that clear cut. Since they're talking about taking lossy compression to the limit, there are ways to go so lossy that you're not longer infringing even if you can point exactly at where it's stored.
I'm familiar with Aaron Swartz's case, and that is actually why I phrased it as "books". In any case, while tragic, Swartz wasn't prosecuted for copyright infringement, but rather for wire fraud and computer fraud due to the manner in which he bypassed protections in MIT's network and the JSTOR API. This wouldn't have been an issue if he downloaded the articles from a source that freely shared them, like sci-hub.
It would be incredibly naive to assume that the scraping done for these models did not at any point circumvent protections.
The fundamental contention is that both accessed, saved and distributed material that they didn't have a "right" to access, save, and distribute. One was made a billionaire for it and another was driven to suicide. It's not tragic, it's societal malpractice.
35 years is a press release sentence. The way DOJ calculates sentences when they write press releases ignores the alleged facts of the particular case and just uses for each charge the theoretically maximum possible sentence that someone could get for that charge.
To actually get that maximum typically requires things like the person is a repeat offender, drug dealing was involved, people were physically harmed, it involved organized crime, it involved terrorism, a large amount of money was involved, or other things that make it an unusual big and serious crime.
The DOJ knows exactly what they are alleging the defendant did. They could easily looks at the various factors that affect sentencing for the charge and see which apply to that case and come up with a realistic number but that doesn't make it sound as impressive in the press release.
Another thing that inflates the numbers in the press releases is that defendants are often charged with several related charges. For many crimes there are groups of related charges that for sentencing get merged. If you are charged with say 3 charges from the same group and convicted on all you are only sentenced for whichever one of them has the longest sentence.
If you've got 3 charges from such a group in the press release the DOJ might just take the completely bogus maximum for each as described above and just add those 3 together.
Here's a good article on DOJ's ridiculous sentence numbers [1].
Here's a couple of articles from an expert in this area of law that looks specifically at what Swartz was charged with and what kind of sentence he was actually looking at [2][3].
Why do you think Swartz was downloading the articles to learn from them? As far as I've seen know one knows for sure what he was intending.
If he wanted to learn from JSTOR articles he could have downloaded them using the JSTOR account he had through his research fellowship at Harvard. Why go to MIT and use their public JSTOR WiFi access, and then when that was cut off hide a computer in a wiring closet hooked into their ethernet?
I've seen claims that he wanted to do was meta research about scientific publishing as a whole which could explain why he needed to download more than he could download with his normal JSTOR account from Harvard, but again why do that using MIT's public WiFi access? JSTOR has granted more direct access to large amounts of data for such research. Did he talk to them first to try to get access that way?
He might have wanted other people to have access to the knowledge, and for free. In comparison, AI companies want to sell access to the knowledge they got by scraping copyrighted works.
Truly wow. The sucking up to coroporations is terrifying. This, when Aaron Swartz was institutionally murdered by the institutions and the state for "copyright infringement". And what he did wasn't even for profit, or even a 0.00001 of the scale of the theft that OpenAI and their ilk have done.
So it's totally OK to rip off and steal and lie through your teeth AND do it all for money, if you're a company.
But if you're a human being, doing it not for profit but for the betterment of your own fellow humans, you deserve to be imprisoned and systematically murdered and driven to suicide.
Thank you for putting my sentiment into words. THIS. It's not power to the people, it's power to the oligarchs. Once you have enough power and, more importantly, wealth, you're welcomed into the fold with open arms. Just how Spotify build a library of stolen music, as long as wealth was created, there is no problem because wealth is just money taken from the people and given to the ruling class.
That's not a one-to-one analogy. The LLM isn't giving you the book, its giving you information it learned from the book.
The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?", and under US copyright law, the answer is: Yes.
> The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?"
The analogous scenario is actually "Can I read a book that I obtained illegally and face no consequences for obtaining it illegally?" The answer is "Yes" there are no consequences for reading said book, for individuals or machines.
But individuals can face serious consequences for obtaining it illegally. And corporations are trying to argue those consequences shouldn't apply to them.
Not to diminish the atrocity of what happened to Aaron, but is this a highly abnormal case of prosecutor overzeal or is it common for people to be charged and held liable for downloading and/or consuming (without distribution) of copyrighted materials (in any form) without obtaining a license?
Asking because I genuinely don't know. I believe all I've ever read about persecution of "commonplace" copyright violations was either about distributors or tied to bidirectional nature of peer-to-peer exchange (torrents typically upload to others even as you download = redistribution).
Aaron Swartz downloaded a lot of stuff. Did he publish the stuff too? That would be an infringement. But only downloading the stuff? And never distributing it? Not sure if it’s worth a violation .
There's no analogous because the scale of it takes it to a whole different level and degree, and for all intents and purposes we tend to care about level and degree.
Me taking over control of the lemonade market in my neighbourhood wouldn't ever be a problem to anyone, a very minor annoyance; instead if I managed to corner the lemonade market of a whole continent it'd be a very different thing.
The better analogy is "can my business use illegally downloaded works to save on buying a license". For example, can you use pirated copy of Windows in your company? Can you use pirated copy of a book to compute weights of a mathematical model?
owning a copy and learning the information is not the same. you can learn 2+2=4 from a book, but you no longer need that book to get that answer. each year in school, I was issued a book for class, learned from it, returned the book. I did not return the learning.
musicians can read the sheet music and memorize how to play it, and no longer need the music. they still have the information.
But you still need to buy the sheet music first, all the AI Labs used pirated materials to learn from.
There's two angles to the lawsuits that are getting confused - the largest one from the book publishers (Sarah Silverman et al) attacked from the angle that the models could reproduce copyrighted information. This was pretty easily quelled / RHLF'd out (used to be that if ChatGPT started producing lyrics a supervisor/censor would just cut off it's response early - tried it now and ChatGPT.com is now more eloquent, "Sorry, I can't provide the full lyrics to "Strawberry Fields Forever" as they are copyrighted. However, I can summarize the song or discuss its themes, meaning, and history if you're interested!")
But there's also the angle of "why does OpenAI have Sarah Silverman's book on their hard drive if they never paid her for it? This is the lawsuit against Meta regarding books3 and torrenting, seems like they're getting away with the "we never redistributed/seeded!" but it's unclear to me why this is a defense against copyright infringement.
Not only would the musician have to buy the sheet music first, but if they were going to perform that piece for profit at an event or on an album they'd need a license of some sort.
This whole mess seems to be another case of "if I can dance around the law fast enough, big enough, and with enough grey areas then I can get away with it".
As a student in a school band that debated whether to choose Pirates of the Caribbean vs Phantom of the Opera for our half time show, I remember the cost of the rights to the music was a factor in our decision.
The school and library purchased the materials outright, again, OpenAI Meta et al never paid to read them, nor borrowed them from an institution that had any right to share.
I'm a bit of an anti intellectual property anarchist myself but it grinds my gears that, given that we do live under the law, it is applied unequally.
It is not remotely the same, the companies training the models are stealing the content from the internet and then profiting from it when they charge for the use of those models.
We are not taking about billboards here, we are talking about copyrighted works, like books.
If you want to do mental gymnastics and call "consuming" the web the act of downloading books without paying for them, then go ahead, but don't pretend the rest will buy your delusion.
The more literature I consume, and the more I re-draft my own attempt, the more I see the patterns and tropes with everyone standing on the shoulders of those who came before.
The general concept of "warp drive" was introduced by John W. Campbell in 1957, "Islands of Space". Popularised by Trek, turned into maths by Alcubierre. Islands of Space feels like it took inspiration from both H G Wells (needing to explain why the War of the Worlds' ending was implausible) and Jules Verne (gang of gentlemen have call-to-action, encounter difficulties that would crush them like a bug and are not merely fine, they go on to further great adventure and reward).
Terry Pratchett had obvious inspirations from Shakespeare, Ringworld, Faust (in the title!).
In the pandemic I read "The Deathworlders" (web fic, not the book series of similar name), and by the time I'd read too many shark jumps to continue, I had spotted many obvious inspirations besides just the one that gave the name.
If I studied medieval lit, I could probably do the same with Shakespeare's inspiration.
Did OpenAI bought one copy of each book, or did they legaly borowed athe books and documents ?
if you copy paste rom books and claim is your content you are plagiarizing.
LLMs were provent to copy paste trained content so now what? Should only big Tech be excluded from plagiarizing ?
This is why I think my array of hard drives full of movies isn't piracy. My server just learned about those movies and can tell me about them, is all. Just like a person!
It doesn't, a real person can't legally obtain a copy of a copyrighted work without paying the copyright holder for it. This is what OpenAI is asking for: they don't want to pay for a single copy of a single book, and still they want to train their models on every single book in history (and song, and movie, and painting, and code base, and anything else they can get their hands on).
These AI models are just obviously new things. They aren’t people, so any analogy about learning from the training material and selling your new skills is off base.
On the other hand, they aren’t just a copy of the training content, and whether the process that creates the weights is sufficiently transformative as to create a new work is… what’s up for debate, right?
Anyway I wish people would stop making these analogies. There isn’t a law covering AI models yet. It is a big industry at this point, and the lack of clarity seems like something we’d expect everybody (legislators and industry) to want to rectify.
Model cannot "learn" because it is not a human. What happens is a human obtains "a free copy" of a copyrighted work, processes it using a machine and sells the result.
> What happens is a human obtains "a free copy" of a copyrighted work, processes it using a machine and sells the result.
Right, so for example it is pretty common to snip up small bits of songs and to use in other songs (sampling). Maybe that could be an example of somewhere to start? But, these ML models seem quite different, I guess because the “samples” are much smaller and usually not individually identifiable. And really the model encodes information about trends in the sources… I dunno. I still think we need a new law.
Even moreso, it only applies to initial model training by companies like OpenAI not other companies using those models to generate synthetic data to train their own models.
Yeah it’s crazy. I also suspect they might not be confident in their defense from the NYT lawsuit - if they’re found in fault then it’s going to be trouble.
It is hard to see how a court could decide that copyright does not apply to training LLMs without completely collapsing the entire legal structure for intellectual property.
Conceptually, AI basically zeros out existing IP, and makes the AI the only IP that has any value. It is hard to imagine large rights holders and courts accepting that.
The likely outcome is that courts rule against LLM creators/providers and they eventually have to settle on licensing fees with large corporate copyright holders similar to YouTube. Unlike YouTube though, this would open up LLM companies to class action lawsuits from the general public, and so it could be a much worse outcome for them.
I would assume that the request is for it to apply to models in the way that it currently applies to humans.
If a human buys a movie, he can watch it and learn about its contents, and then talk about those contents, and he can create a similar movie with a similar theme.
If OpenAI buys a movie and shows it to their model, it's unclear whether the model can talk about the contents of the movie and create a similar movie with a similar theme.
Since "buying" a movie (as it currently applies to humans) is just buying a limited license to it for private viewing, can't the copyright holder opt to limit the $4.99 license terms to human viewing, and charge $4999 for an AI training license?
Or OpenAI could buy movies the way Disney does, by buying the actual copyright to the film.
>Since "buying" a movie (as it currently applies to humans) is just buying a limited license to it for private viewing, can't the copyright holder opt to limit the $4.99 license terms to human viewing, and charge $4999 for an AI training license?
> Since "buying" a movie is just buying a license to it, can't the copyright holder opt to limit the $4.99 license terms to human viewing, and charge $4999 for an AI training license?
That's exactly what already happens currently. Buying a movie on DVD doesn't give you the right to present it for hundreds of people. You need to pay for a public performance license or commercial licence. This is why a TV network or movie theatre can't just buy a DVD at Walmart and then show the movie as often as it likes.
Copyright doesn't just grant exclusive distribution rights. It grants exclusive use rights as well, and permits the owner to control how their work is used. Since AI rights are not granted by any existing licenses, and license terms generally reserve any rights not explicitly specified, feeding copyrighted works into an AI data model is a reserved right of the owner.
It still warps my brain, they’ve taken trillions of dollars of industry and made a product worth billions by stealing it. IP is practically the basis of the economy, and these models warp and obfuscate ownership of everything, like a giant reset button on who can hold knowledge. It wouldn’t be legal, or allowed if tech wasn't seen as the growth path of our economy. It’s a hell of a needle to thread and it’s unlikely that anyone will ever again be able to model from data so open.
"IP" is a very new concept in our culture and completely absent in other cultures. It was invented to prevent verbatim reprints of books, but even so, the publishing industry existed for hundreds of years before then. It's been expanded greatly in the past 50 years.
Acting like copyright is some natural law of the universe that LLMs are upending simply because they can learn from written texts is silly.
If you want to argue that it should be radically expanded to the point that not only a work, but even the ideas and knowledge contained in that work should be censored and restricted, fine. But at least have the honesty to admit that this is a radical new expansion for a body of law that has already been radically expanded relatively recently.
> It was invented to prevent verbatim reprints of books
It was also invented to keep the publishing houses under control and keep them from papering the land in anti-crown propaganda (like the stuff that fueled the civil war in England and got Charles I beheaded).
Probably one of the biggest brewing fights will be whether the models are free to tell the truth or whether they'll be mouthpieces for the ruling class. As long as they play ball with the powers that be, I predict copyrights won't be a problem at all for the chosen winners.
That's actually a great point. Judging from the current state of media, there is a clear momentum to take sides in moral arguments. Maybe the standard for models need to be a fair use clause?
I agree this would be a positive direction, but something that gives me pause is the forced upgrades and hardware cycle of both mac and windows now. They both scan files in your system constantly for various reasons, so for this purpose you're really stuck on *nix variants, right?
“The Venetian Patent Statute of 19 March 1474, established by the Republic of Venice, is usually considered to be the earliest codified patent system in the world.[11][12] It states that patents might be granted for "any new and ingenious device, not previously made", provided it was useful. By and large, these principles still remain the basic principles of current patent laws.“
As another commenter says, this is about IP, but even positing that copyright is somehow invalid because it’s new is incredibly obtuse. You know what other law is relatively new? Women’s suffrage.
I’m annoyed by arguments like the above because they’re clearly derived from working backwards from a desired conclusion; in this case, that someone’s original work can be consumed and repurposed to create profit by someone else. Our laws and society have determined this to be illegal; the fact that it would be con isn’t for OpenAI if it weren’t has no bearing.
> It's been expanded greatly in the past 50 years.
Elephant in the room. If copyright and patent both expired after 20 years or so then I might feel very differently about the system, and by extension about machine learning practices.
It's absurd to me that broad cultural artifacts which we share with our parent's (or even grandparent's) generation can be legally owned.
What AI companies are doing (downloading pirated music and training models) is completely unfair. It takes lot of money (everything related to music is expensive), talent and work to record a good song and what AI companies do is just grab millions of songs for free and call it "fair use". If their developers are so smart and talented why don't they simply compose and record the music by themselves?
> not only a work, but even the ideas and knowledge contained in that work
AI models reproduce existing audio tracks when asked, although in a distorted and low-quality form.
Also it will be funny to observe how US government will try to ignore violating copyright for AI while issuing ridiculous fines for torrenting a movie by ordinary citizens.
Everything in tech is unfair. Music teachers replaced by apps and videos. Audio engineers replaced by apps. Albums manufacturing and music stores replaced by digital downloads. Custom instruments replaced by digital soundboards. Trained vocalists replaced by auto-tune. AI is just the final blip of squeezing humans out of music.
Not just music, models are trained on all types of art forms that have been created by humans across every medium and businesses are now choosing to use content from AI rather than pay an artist.
Breakout success can still be achieved from humans who create brand new art styles that can't yet be replicated by an AI. These artists will reap the rewards until all of these works are added to the subsequent AI training models.
Is it the same thing though?
Even though Lord Of The Rings, the book, likely has been used to train the models you can't reproduce it. Nor can you make a derivative of it. Is it really the same comparison like "Simba the white lion" and "the lion king"?
Gearing up for a fight between the two major industries based on exploitative business models:
Copyright cartels (RIAA, MPAA) that monetized young artists without paying them much at all [1], vs the AI megalomaniacs who took all the work for free and used Kenyans at $2 an hour [2] so that they can raise "$7 trillion" for their AI infrastructure
Can't believe I'm actually rooting for the copyright cartels in this fight.
But that does make me think, that in a sane society with a functional legislature I wouldn't have to pick a dog in this fight. I'd have have enough faith in lawmakers and the political process to pursue a path towards copyright reform that reigns in abuses from both AI companies and megacorp rightsholders
Alas, for now I'm hoping that aforementioned megacorps sue OpenAI into a painful lesson.
They're suing Internet Archive because IA scanned a bunch of copyrighted books to put online for free (e: without even attempting to get permission to do so) then refused to take them down when they got a C&D lol. IA is putting the whole project at risk so they can do literal copyright infringement with no consequences.
It's not lambasting to communicate what happened. IA got a C&D, refused to comply, and got sued for copyright infringement. The courts sided with the publishers when IA tried to claim it was fair use (technologists seem to have a pattern of stretching the definition of fair use). They've put their entire project at risk because they've repeatedly ignored the law here. That's just what happened.
I should have "freedom to learn" about any Tesla in the showroom, any F-35 I see laying around an airbase or the contents of anyone in the governments bank account.
Chinese AI must implement socialist values by law, but law is a much more fluid fuzzy thing in China than in the USA (although the USA seems to be moving away from rule of law recently).
> Chinese AI must implement socialist values by law
I don't doubt it but am interested to read a source? I know the models can't talk about things like Tiananmen Square 1989, but what does 'implementing socialist values by law' look like?
Although censorship isn't mentioned specifically, it is definitely 99% of what they are focused on (the other 1% being scams).
China practices Rule by law, not Rule of law, so you know...they'll know its bad when they see it, so model providers will exercise extreme self censorship (which is already true for social network providers).
In practice the US is less different than you imply. For the vast majority of Americans, being sued is a punishment in and of itself due to the prohibitive costs of hiring a lawyer. In the US we have a right to a “speedy” trial but there are many people sitting in jail now because they can’t afford the bail get out. Speedy could mean months.
I say this because when we constantly fall so far short of our ideals, one begins to question if those are really our ideals.
No one has pure rule of law, but at least the USA has it as a goal. The Chinese government has stated explicitly that rule of law isn’t a goal, so it leads to a very different legal system from ours. You have to think much more deeply about the spirit of the law and the flippant intentions of the official class that has all the power (the judicial system isn’t allowed to check official power, or even interpret ambiguous or competing laws).
> The Chinese government has stated explicitly that rule of law isn’t a goal
Can you share where you saw this? I am also not aware of anywhere that the US has stated that rule of law is a goal. What you are referring to is more of a norm or tradition. And norms can and do change over time for better or worse.
You could argue that rule of law follows from the preamble to the constitution but that doesn’t explicitly mention rule of law either. It mentions various values like justice and tranquility.
All you have to do is read the Chinese constitution to figure it out. Freedom of speech, religion, press, are all there but aren’t meaningful rights since there is no enforcement of those rights. For the rest, here is a document that explains the concept in more detail. https://www.swp-berlin.org/10.18449/2021C28/
> The aim is to use the law as a political instrument to make the state more efficient and to reduce the arbitrariness of how the law is applied for the majority of the population, among other things, with the help of advanced technology. In some areas, for example on procedural issues, Beijing continues to draw inspiration from the West in establishing its Chinese “rule of law”. However, the party-state leadership rejects an independent judiciary and the principle of separation of powers as “erroneous western thought”. Beijing is explicitly interested in propagating China’s conception of law and legal practice internationally, establishing new legal standards and enforcing its interests through the law. Berlin and Brussels should, therefore, pay special attention to the Chinese leadership’s concept of the law. In-depth knowledge on this topic will be imperative in order to grasp the strategic implications of China’s legal policy, to better understand the logic of their actions and respond appropriately.
This is mostly transcribed from those meetings (vs a westerner interpretation). You really need to understand this to get how the legal systems are different, and how party officials are basically given supreme power (only checked by their bosses).
The pod was good apart from starting/spreading the rumor that high numbers of “bill to Singapore” was evidence that China was circumventing GPU import bans.
Look it at literally who will have GPU dominance in future. (obv who will hit Qbit at scale... but we are at this scale now - and control currently is controlled by policy, then bits, then Qbits.)
Remember, we are witnessing the "Wouldnt it be cool if..?" CyberPunk manifestations of our Cyberpunk Readings of youth?
((I buildt a bunch of shit that spied on you because I read NeuroMancer, and thought wouldnt it be cool if..."
And then I helped build Ono Sendai throughout my career...
Those cases did very poorly whenever they actually went to court (well at least also including the ones that were summarily dismissed by the courts, meaning they didn't technically make it to court). They were much more of a mafia style shakedown than an actual legal enforcement effort.
Same rules, but people are a lot less inclined to defend themselves because the cost of loss was seen as too high to even risk it.
>Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, said in an interview that the US AI Safety Institute – a key government group focused on AI – could act as the main point of contact between the federal government and the private sector. If companies work with the group voluntarily to review models, the government could provide them “with liability protections including preemption from state based regulations that focus on frontier model security,” according to the proposal.
Given OpenAI's history and relationship with the "AI safety" movement, I wouldn't be surprised to find out later that they also lobbied for the same proposed state-level regulations they're seeking relief from.
Moat is an Orwellian word and we should reject words that contain a conceptual metaphor that is convenient for abusing power.
"Building a moat" frames anti-competitive behavior as a defense rather than an assault on the free market by implying that monopolistic behavior is a survival strategy rather than an attempt to dominate the market and coerce customers.
"We need to build a moat" is much more agreeable to tell employees than "we need to be more anti-competitive."
It is pretty obvious that every use of that word is to communicate a stance that is allergic to free markets.
A moat by definition has such a large strategic asymmetry that one cannot cross it without a very high chance of death. A functioning SEC and FTC as well as CFPB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_... are necessary for efficient markets.
Now might be the time to rollout consumer club cards that are adversarial in nature.
A "moat" is a fine business term for what it relates to, and most moats are innocuous:
* The secret formula for Coke
* ASML's technology
* The "Gucci" brand
* Apple's network effects
These are genuine competitive advantages in the market. Regulatory moats and other similar things are an assault on the free market. Moats in general are not.
I'm with you except for that last one. Innovation provides a moat that also benefits the consumer. In contrast, network effects don't seem to provide any benefit. They're just a landscape feature that can be taken advantage of by the incumbent to make competition more difficult.
I'm hardly the only one to think this way, hence regulation such as data portability in the EU.
I agree with you in general, but there are network effects at Apple that are helpful to the consumer. For example, iphone-mac integration makes things better for owners of both, and Apple can internally develop protocols like their "bump to share a file" protocol much faster than they can as part of an industry consortium. Both of these are network effects that are beneficial to the consumer.
I'm not sure a single individual owning multiple products from the same company is the typical way "network effect" is used.
The protocol example is a good one. However I don't think it's the network effect that's beneficial in that case but rather the innovation of the thing that was built.
If it's closed, I think that facet specifically is detrimental to the consumer.
If it's open, then that's the best you can do to mitigate the unfortunate reality that taking advantage of this particular innovation requires multiple participating endpoints. It's just how it is.
I'm fine with Apple making their gear work together, but they shouldn't be privileged over third parties.
Moreover, they shouldn't have any way to force (or even nudge via defaults) the user to use Apple Payments, App Store, or other Apple platform pieces. Anyone should be on equal footing and there shouldn't be any taxation. Apple already has every single advantage, and what they're doing now is occupying an anticompetitive high ground via which they can control (along with duopoly partner Google) the entire field of mobile computing.
Based on your examples (which did genuinely make me question my assertion), it seems that patents and exclusivity deals are a major part of moat development, as are pricing games and rampant acquisitions.
Apple's network effects are anti-compeitive creating vendor lock-in, which allows them to coerce customers. I generally defend Apple. But they are half anti-competitive (coerce customers), half competitive (earn customers), but earning customers is fueled by the coercive app store.
This is a very clear example of how moat is an abusive word. Under one framing (moat) network effects are a way to earn customers by spending resources on projects that earn customers (defending market position). In the anti-competitive framing, network effects are an explicit strategy to create vendor lock in and make it more challenging to migrate to other platforms so apple's budget to implement anti-customer policies is bigger.
ASML is a patent based monopoly, with exclusivity agreements with suppliers, with significant export controls. I will grant you that bleeding edge technology is arguably the best case argument for the word moat, but it's also worth asking in detail how technology is actually developed and understanding that patents are state sanctioned monopolies.
Both Apple and ASML could reasonably be considered monopo-like. So I'm not sure they are the best defense against how moat implies anti-competitive behavior. Monopolies are fundamentally anti-competitive.
The Gucci brand works against the secondary market for their goods and has an army of lawyers to protect their brand against imitators and has many limiting/exclusivity agreements on suppliers.
Coke's formula is probably the least "moaty" thing about coca cola. Their supply chain is their moat and their competitive advantage is also rooted in exclusivity deals. "Our company is so competitive because our recipe is just that good" is a major kool-aid take.
Patents are arguably good, but are legalized anti-competition. Exclusivity agreements don't seem very competitive. Acquisitions are anti-competitive. Pricing games to snuff out competition seems like the type of thing that can done chiefly in anti-competitive contexts.
So ASML isn't an argument against "moat means anti-competitive", but an argument that sometimes anti-competitive behavior is better for society because it allows for otherwise economically unfeasible things to be be feasible. The other brand's moats are much more rooted in business practices around acquisitions and suppliers creating de facto vertical integrations. Monopolies do offer better cheaper products, until they attain a market position that allows them to coerce customers.
Anti-trust authorities have looked at those companies.
Another conceptual metaphor is "president as CEO." The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous.
You could reasonably argue that the president functions as a CEO, but the metaphor itself is there to manufacture consent for unchecked power.
Conceptual metaphors are insidious. PR firms and think tanks actively work to craft these insidious metaphors that shape conversations and how people think about the world. By the time you've used the metaphor, you've already accepted many of the implications of the metaphor without even knowing it.
Patents are state-sanctioned monopolies. That is their explicit purpose. And for all the "shoulders of giants" and "science is a collective effort" arguments, none of them can explain why no Chinese company (a jurisdiction that does not respect Western patents) can do what ASML does. They have the money and the expertise, but somehow they don't have the technology.
Also, the Gucci brand does not have lawyers. The Gucci brand is a name, a logo, and an aesthetic. Kering S.A. (owners of Gucci), enforces that counterfeit Gucci products don't show up. The designers at Kering spend a lot of effort coming up with Gucci-branded products, and they generally seem to have the pulse of a certain sector of the market.
The analysis of Coke's supply chain is wrong. The supply chain Coke uses is pretty run-of-the-mill, and I'm pretty sure that aside from the syrup (with the aforementioned secret formula), they actually outsource most of their manufacturing. They have good scale, but past ~100 million cans, I'm not sure you get many economies of scale in soda. That's why my local supermarket chain can offer "cola" that doesn't quite taste like Coke for cheaper than Coke. You could argue that the brand and the marketing are the moat, but the idea that Coke has a supply chain management advantage (let alone a moat over this) is laughable.
> "Building a moat" frames anti-competitive behavior as a defense
This is a drastic take, I think to most of us in the industry "moat" simply means whatever difficult-to-replicate competitive advantage that a firm has invested heavily in.
Regulatory capture and graft aren't moats, they're plain old corrupt business practices.
The problem is that moat is a defensive word and using it to describe competitive advantage implies that even anti-competitive tactics are defensive because that's the frame under which the conversation is taking place.
Worse that "moats" are a good thing, which they are for the company, but not necessarily society at large. The larger the moat, the more money coming out of your pocket as a customer.
You need a big "/s" after this. Or maybe just not post it at all, because it's just value-less snark and not a substantial comment on how hypocritical and harmful OpenAI is (which they certainly are).
Can anyone say which of the LLM companies is the least "shady"?
If I want to use an LLM to augment my work, and don't have a massively powerful local machine to run local models, what are the best options?
Obviously I saw the news about OpenAI's head of research openly supporting war crimes, but I don't feel confident about what's up with the other companies.
E.g. i'm very outspoken about my preferences for open llm practices like executed by Meta and Deepseek. I'm very aware of the regulatory caption and pulling up the ladder tactics by the "AI safety" lobby.
However. In my own operations I do still rely on OpenAI because it works better than what I tried so far for my use case.
That said, when I can find an open model based SaaS operator that serves my needs as well without major change investment, I will switch.
I'm not talking about me developing the applications, but about using LLM services inside the products in operation.
For my "vibe coding" I've been using OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek if using small method generation, documentation shortcuts, library discovery and debugging counts as such.
Trump should have a Most Favored Corporate status, each corporation in a vertical can compete for favor and the one that does gets to be "teacher's pet" when it comes to exemptions, contracts, trade deals, priority in resource right access, etc.
Can you explain why this is associated with fascism specifically, and not any other form of government which has high levels of oligarchical corruption (like North Korea, Soviet Russia, etc).
I am not saying you’re wrong, but please educate me why is this form of corruption/cronyism is unique to fascism?
It might be basic, but I found the Wikipedia article to be a good place to start:
> An important aspect of fascist economies was economic dirigism,[35] meaning an economy where the government often subsidizes favorable companies and exerts strong directive influence over investment, as opposed to having a merely regulatory role. In general, fascist economies were based on private property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.
It’s a poor definition. The same “subsidization and directive influence” applies to all of Krugman’s Nobel-wining domestic champion, emerging market development leaders, in virtually all ‘successful’ economies. It also applies in the context of badly run, failed and failing economies. Safe to say this factor is only somewhat correlated. Broad assertions are going to be factually wrong.
The key element here is that the power exchange in this case goes both ways. The corporations do favors for the administration (sometimes outright corrupt payments and sometimes useful favors, like promoting certain kinds of content in the media, or firing employees who speak up.) And in exchange the companies get regulatory favors. While all economic distortions can be problematic — national champion companies probably have tradeoffs - this is a form of distortion that hurts citizens both by distorting the market, and also by distorting the democratic environment by which citizens might correct the problems.
So then you agree that the original post that called this "text book fascism" was wrong, as this is just one very vague, and only slightly correlated property.
All snakes have scales, so there is a 100% correlation between being a snake and having scales.
That does not imply that fish are snakes. Nor does the presence of scaled fish invalidate the observation that having scales is a defining attribute of snakes (it's just not a sufficient attribute to define snakes).
For correlation to be 1, it's not enough that all snakes have scales. You also need all scaly animals to be snakes.
Here's a toy example. Imagine three equally sized groups of animals: scaly snakes, scaly fish, and scaleless fish. (So all snakes have scales, but not all scaly animals are snakes.) That's three data points (1,1) (0,1) (0,0) with probability 1/3 each. The correlation between snake and scaly comes out as 1/2.
You can also see it geometrically. The only way correlation can be 1 is if all points lie on a straight line. But in this case it's a triangle.
You’re looking for the logical argument here, not the statistical one. You sampled from snakes and said there is a 100% correlation with being a snake (notwithstanding the counterarg in an adjacent comment about scale-free snakes).
I am noting that the logical argument does not hold in the provided definition. If “some” attributes hold in a definition, you are expanding the definitional set, not reducing it, and thus creating a low-res definition. That is why I said: ‘this is a poor definition.’
Yea fascism, communism, etc aren’t abstract ideals in the real world. Instead they are self reinforcing directions along a multidimensional political spectrum.
The scary thing with fascism is just how quickly it can snowball because people at the top of so many powerful structures in society benefit. US Presidents get a positive spin by giving more access to organizations that support them. Those kinds of quiet back room deals benefit the people making them, but not everyone outside the room.
That's not fascism, that is the dysfunctional status quo in literally every single country in the world. Why do you think companies and billionaires dump what amounts to billions of dollars on candidates? Often times it's not even this candidate or that, but both!
They then get access, get special treatment, and come out singing the praises of [errr.. what's his name again?]
It’s not Fascism on its own, but it’s representative of the forces that push society to Fascism.
Start looking and you’ll find powerful forces shaping history. Sacking a city is extremely profitable throughout antiquity, which then pushes cities to have defensive capabilities which then…
In the Bronze Age trade was critical as having Copper ore alone wasn’t nearly as useful as having copper and access to tin. Iron however is found basically everywhere as where trees.
Such forces don’t guarantee outcomes, but they have massive influence.
It's rather amusing reading the link on dirigisme given the context of its alleged implication. [1] A word which I, and suspect most, have never heard before.
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The term emerged in the post-World War II era to describe the economic policies of France which included substantial state-directed investment, the use of indicative economic planning to supplement the market mechanism and the establishment of state enterprises in strategic domestic sectors. It coincided with both the period of substantial economic and demographic growth, known as the Trente Glorieuses which followed the war, and the slowdown beginning with the 1973 oil crisis.
The term has subsequently been used to classify other economies that pursued similar policies, such as Canada, Japan, the East Asian tiger economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; and more recently the economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after its economic reforms,[2] Malaysia, Indonesia[3][4] and India before the opening of its economy in 1991.[5][6][7]
Socialism and communism are state ownership. Fascism tends toward private ownership and state control. This is actually easier and better for the state. It gets all the benefit and none of the responsibility and can throw business leaders under the bus.
All real world countries have some of this, but in fascism it’s really overt and dialed up and for the private sector participation is not optional. If you don’t toe the line you are ruined or worse. If you do play along you can get very very rich, but only if you remember who is in charge.
“Public private partnership” style ventures are kind of fascism lite, and they always worried me for that reason. It’s not an open bid but a more explicit relationship. If you look back at Musk’s career in particular there are ominous signs of where this was going.
The private industry side of fascist corporatism is very similar to all kinds of systematic state industry cronyism, particularly in other authoritarian systems that aren't precisely fascist (and named systems of government are just idealized points on the multidimensional continuum on which actual governments are distributed, anyway), what distinguishes fascism particularly is the combination of its form of corporatism with xenophobia, militaristic nationalism, etc., not the form of corporatism alone.
I think it is associated with fascism, just from the other party.
This is pretty common fascist practice that is used all over Europe and in any left-leaning countries, when with regulations governments make doing business on large scale impossible, and then give largest players exemptions, subsidies and so on. Governments gain enormous leverage to ensure corporate loyalty, silence dissenters and combat opposition, while the biggest players secure their place at the top and gain protection from competitors.
So the plan was push regulations and then dominate over the competitors with exemptions from those regulations. But fascists loose the election, regulations threaten to start working in a non-discriminatory manner, and this will simply hinder business.
That's in progress. It's called the MAGA Parallel Economy.[1]
Donald Trump, Jr. is in charge. Vivek Ramaswamy and Peter Thiel are involved.
Azoria ETF and 1789 Capital are funds designed to fund MAGA-friendly companies.
But this may be a sideshow. The main show is US CEOs sucking up to Trump, as happened at the inauguration. That parallels something Putin did in 2020.
Putin called in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them "Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched." "Loyalty is what Putin values above all else.” Three of the oligarchs didn't do that. Berezovsky was forced out of Russia. Gusinsky was arrested, and later fled the country. Khodorkovsky, regarded as Russia’s richest man at the time (Yukos Oil), was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in jail. He got out in 2013 and left for the UK. Interestingly, he was seen at Trump's inauguration.
> That parallels something Putin did in 2020. Putin called in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them "Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched.
Why are these idiots trying to ape Russia, a dumpster fire, to make America great again?
If there’s anyone to copy it’s China in industry and maybe elements of Western Europe and Japan in some civic areas.
Russia is worse on every metric, even the ones conservatives claim to care about: lower birth rate, high divorce rate, much higher abortion rate, higher domestic violence rate, more drug use, more alcoholism, and much less church attendance.
Because they aren’t interested in “making America great again”, that’s the marketing line used to sell it to American voters. They are solely interested in looting the nation for personal gain.
I believe with regulatory capture the companies that pushed for the regulation in the first place at least comply with it (and hopefully the regulation is not worthless). This behaviour by ClosedAI is even worse: push for the regulation, then push for the exemption.
Regulatory capture is usually the company pushing for regulations that align with the business practices they already implement and would be hard for a competitor to implement. For example, a car company that wants to require all other manufactures to build and operate wind tunnels for aerodynamics testing. Or more realistically, regulations requiring 3rd party sellers for vehicles.
Regulators can require all manufactures to build and operate wind tunnels for aerodynamics testing, or alternatively allow someone from south africa to be president.
That's the first time I've ever heard someone make this unusual and very specific definition. It's almost always much simpler - you get favorable regulatory findings and exemptions by promising jobs or other benefits to the people doing the regulating. It's not complicated, it's just bribery with a different name.
I haven't heard that definition of "Regulatory Capture" before. I mostly thought it was just when the regulators are working for industry instead of the people. That is, the regulators have been "Captured." The politicians who nominate the regulatory bodies are paid off by industry to keep it that way.
I’ve seen this happen many times during the RFI/RFP process for large projects, the largest players put boots on the ground early and try to get into the ears of the decision makers and their consultants and “helpfully” educate them. On multiple occasions I’ve seen requests actually using a specific vendor’s product name as a generic term without realizing it, when their competitors’ products worked in a completely different way and didn’t have a corresponding component in their offering.
I agree. I wasn't trying to strictly define it just specify the form it usually takes.
In the case of OpenAI, were I to guess, they'll likely do things like push for stronger copyright laws or laws against web scraping. Things that look harmless but ultimately will squash new competitors in the AI market. Now that they already have a bunch of the data to train their models, they'll be happy to make it a little harder for them to get new data if it means they don't have to compete.
Regulatory capture has different flavours, but it basically comes down to the regulated taking control of or significantly influencing the regulator. It can be by the complete sector, but in my experience most often by the leading incumbants in a domain.
It can be through keeping regulation to be mild or look the other way, but as often to put up high cost/high compliance burdens in place to pull up the drawbridge for new entrants.
We all predicted this would happen but somehow the highly intelligent employees at OpenAI getting paid north of $1M could not foresee this obvious eventuality.
I worry I'm just trying too hard to make it make sense, and this is a TimeCube [0] situation.
The most-charitable paraphrase I can come up with it: "Bad people can't use LLMs to hide facts, hiding facts means removing source-materials. Math doesn't matter for politics which are mainly propaganda."
However even that just creates contradictions:
1. If math and logic are not important for uncovering wrongdoing, why was "tabulation" cited as an important feature in the first post?
2. If propaganda dominates other factors, why would the (continued) existence of the Internet Archive be meaningful? People will simply be given an explanation (or veneer of settled agreement) so that they never bother looking for source-material. (Or in the case of IA, copies of source material.)
OMG Thank you - hilarious. TimeCube is a legend...
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I am saying that AI can be used very beneficially to do a calculated dissection of the Truth of our Political structure as a Nation and how it truly impacts an Individual/Unit (person, family) -- and do so where we can get discernible metrics and utilize AIs understanding of the vast matrices of such inputs to provide meaningful outputs. Simple.
EDIT @MegaButts;
>>Why is this better than AI
People tend to think of AI in two disjointed categories; [AI THAT KNOWS EVERYTHING] v [AI THAT CAN EASILY SIFT THROUGH VAST EVERYTHING DATA GIVEN TO IT AND BE COMMANDED TO OUTPUT FINDINGS THAT A HUMAN COULDN'T DO ALONE]
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Which do you think I refer to?
AI is transformative (pun intended) -- in that it allows for very complex questions to be asked of our very complex civilization in a simple and EveryMan hands...
Why is AI better for this than a human? We already know AI is fundamentally biased by its training data in a way where it's actually impossible to know how/why it's biased. We also know AI makes things up all the time.
If you dont understand the benefit of an AI augmenting the speed and depth of ingestion of Domain Context into a human mind.. then... go play with chalk.||I as a smart Human operate on lots of data... and AI and such has allowed me to consume such.
The most important medicines in the world are MEMORY retention...
It s youd like a conspiracy, eat too much aluminum to give you alzheimers asap so your generation forgets... (based though. hope you undestand what I am saying)
How is it any more accessible now than it was before? Don't you have to fact-check everything it says anyway, effectively doing the research you'd do without it?
I'm not saying LLMs are useless, but I do not understand your use case.
It does have an effect; it is just a slow and grinding process. And people have screwy senses of proportion - like old mate mentioning insider trading. Of all the corruption in the US Congress insider trading is just not an issue. They've wasted trillions of dollars on pointless wars and there has never been a public accounting of what the real reasoning was. That sort of process corruption is a much bigger problem.
A great example - people forget what life was like pre-Snowden. The authoritarians were out in locked ranks pretending that the US spies were tolerable - it made any sort of organisation to resist impossible. Then one day the parameters of the debate get changed and suddenly everyone is forced to agree that encryption everywhere is the only approach that makes sense.
It's a common tactic in new fields. Fusion, AI, you name it are all actively lobbying to get new regulation because they are "different", and the individual companies want to ensure that it's them that sets the tone.
Exactly. I'm reminded of Gavin Belson saying something along the lines of "I don't want to live in a world where someone makes it a better place to live than we do" in Silicon Valley.
LLM usage is still gaining traction. OpenAI may not be on top anymore, but they still have useful services, and they aren’t going under anytime soon.
And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.
Controlling demand for services is something that could stop this, but it’s technological progress, which could enable solutions for global warming, hunger, and disease.
It’s a locomotive out-of-control. Prayer is the answer I’d think of.
>And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.
They don't care about that if they get a regulatory moat around them.
There’s only so much of that you can do without it becoming a problem you have to deal with. There is a limited supply of water in any area of the earth.
If they’re not making money[1], and competitors are, or competitors are able to run at a negative for longer, then things could definitely wrap up for them quickly. To most consumers, LLMs will be a feature (of Google/Bing/X/Meta/OS), not a product itself.
I remember for years people on HN said Uber would never work as a profitable business because it spent a lot of VC money earlier on without having enough revenue to cover it all. It's been around for 16yrs now despite running in the black until 2023.
Waymo has ~1000 cars. Uber has 8 million drivers. Worst case Uber will be acquired or merger or make a deal with one of the many AI driving startups.
I predict Waymo will have their own struggles with profitability. Last I heard the LIDAR kit they put on cars costs more than the car. So they'll have to mass produce + maintain some fancy electronics on a million+ cars.
Don't worry; they'll have plenty of time to regret that.
There's a reason they're sweating the data issue. As much as it sucks to say it, Google/Bing/Meta/etc. all have a shitton of proprietary human-generated data they can work with, train on, fine tune with, etc. OpenAI _needs_ more human generated data desperately to keep going.
No moat means Joe Anybody can compete with them. You just need billions in capital, a zillion GPUs, thousands of hyper skilled employees. You need to somehow get the attention of tens of millions of consumers (and then pull them away from the competition, ha).
Sure.
The same premise was endlessly floated about eg Uber and Google having no moats (Google was going to be killed by open search, Baidu, magic, whatever). These things are said by people that don't understand the comically vast cost of big infrastructure, branding, consumer lock-in (or consumer behavior in general), market momentum, the difficulty of raising enormous sums of capital, and so on.
Oh wait the skeptics say: what about DeepSeek. To scale and support that you're going to need what I described. What's the plan for supporting 100 million subscribers globally with a beast of an LLM that wants all the resources you can muster? Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh but wait, everyone is going to run a datacenter out of their home and operate their own local LLM, uhh nope. It's overwhelmingly staying in the cloud and it's going to cost far over a trillion dollars to power it globally over the next 20 years.
OpenAI has the same kind of moat that Google has, although their brand/reach/size obviously isn't on par at this point.
365 is not taking off. Numbers are average at best. Most companies now pay 20/user/month extra, and whilst the sentiment is that it likely kina is somehow worth it, nobody claims it would be better than break even. Many users are deeply disappointed with the overpromising in powerpoint and excel. Sure it's quite useful in outlook and the assistant is great to find files in scattered sharepoints, but that's the limit of my value with it.
OpenAI copilot, not microsoft copilot, actually looks like a stronger product and they're going full force after the enterprise market as we speak. We're setting a demo in motion with them next month to give it a go.
We'll have to wait for the first one to crack Powerpoint, that'll be the gamechanger.
I mean… he has supported at least one good cause I know of where the little guy was getting screwed way beyond big time and he stepped up pro bono. So I like him. But probably mostly a hired gun.
If you get fined millions of dollars (for copyright, of course) if you're found to have anything resembling DeepSeek on your machine - no company in the US is going to run it.
The personal market is going to be much smaller than the enterprise market.
The artificial token commodity can now be functionally replicated on a per location basis on $40k in hardware (far lower cost than nvidia hardware.)
Copyright licensing is just a detail corporations are well experienced dealing with in a commercial setting, and note some gov organizations are already exempt from copyright laws. However, people likely just won't host in countries with silly policies.
Salt was used to pay salaries at one time too, and ML/"AI" business models projecting information asymmetry are now paradoxical as a business goal.
Note: Data centers often naturally colocate with cold-climates, low-cost energy generation facilities, and fiber optic distance to major backbones/hubs.
At a certain scale, Energy cost is more important than location and hardware. The US just broke its own horses leg with tariffs before the race. Not bullish on the US domestic tech firms these days, and sympathize with the good folks at AMCHAM that will ultimately be left to clean up the mess eventually.
If businesses have opportunity to cut their operational variable costs >25%, than one can be fairly certain these facilities won't be located on US soil.
>If businesses have opportunity to cut their operational variable costs >25%, than one can be fairly certain these facilities won't be located on US soil.
Is there opportunity? Lower risks and energy prices may well outweigh the cost of tariffs. It is not like any other horse in the race has perfectly healthy legs.
Depends on the posture, as higher profit businesses may invest more into maintaining market dominance. However, the assumption technology is a zero-sum economic game was dangerously foolish, and attempting to cheat the global free market is ultimately futile.
That would give an advantage to foreign companies. The EU tried that and while that doesn't destroy your tech dominance overnight, it gradually chips from it.
As it is, this is a bullshit document, which I'm sure their lobbyists know; OSTP is authorized to "serve as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans, and programs of the Federal Government," and has no statutory authority to regulate anything, let alone preempt state law. In the absence of any explicit Congressional legislation to serve to federally preempt state regulation of AI, there's nothing the White House can do. (In fact, other than export controls and a couple of Defense Production Act wishlist items, everything in their "proposal" is out of the Executive's hands and the ambit of Congress.)
I heard something today and I wonder if someone can nitpick it.
If what the admin is doing is illegal, then a court stops it, and they appeal and win, then it wasn't illegal. If they appeal all the way up and lose, then they can't do it.
So what exactly is the problem?
Mind you, I am asking for nits, this isn't my idea. I don't think "the administration will ignore the supreme court" is a good nit.
The problem is that it's erasing a lot of precedent that has existed for hundreds of years in the US, and it's not apparent that the erasure will be a good thing for us. For example, the idea that the president has some kind of soverign immunity from murder or theft or graft while they are the president as long as they can justify it as carrying out a duty of the office is pretty abhorrent. Military officers in the US have pretty strict requirements not to commit war crimes and there is a pretty strong concept of an "illegal order." And what we're telling the president now is that because he or she is the executive there can be no such thing as an illegal order. So now the president can personally shoot people and they have immunity from that because they are the president.
And you have people arguing that on the one hand the executive has had too much leeway to regulate, but then in the same breath saying that the executive now needs to unilaterally ignore the orders of past congresses in order to fix whatever perceived problems have led us here. Which is a kind of irony that makes me think that this is being done not to solve problems but to reshape our government for some other end. And all of this is compounded by the legislature's unwillingness to exercise the exact power that they have been granted, which is to change the law of the United States.
So in this situation it's hard to see the courts siding with these people as simply rationally applying the law, because the law itself as written by past legislatures is simply being ignored, as are past judicial precedents, because they are inconvenient to the goal of dismantling the US government. It's also extremely dangerous because the "full faith and credit" of the United States depends on us honoring our commitments even when they are inconvenient to us.
US tech, and western tech in general, is very culturally - and by this I mean in the type of coding people have done - homogeneous.
The deep seek papers published over the last two weeks are the biggest thing to happen in IA since GPT3 came out. But unless you understand distributed file systems, networking, low level linear algebra, and half a dozen other fields at least tangentially then you'd have not realized they are anything important at all.
Meanwhile I'm going through the interview process for a tier 1 US AI lab and I'm having to take a test about circles and squares, then write a compsci 101 red/black tree search algorithm while talking to an AI, being told not to use AI at the same time. This is with an internal reference being keen for me to be on board. At this point I'm honestly wondering if they aren't just using the interview process to generate high quality validation data for free.
Competition can only work when there is variation between the entities competing.
In the US right now you can have a death match between every AI lab, then give all the resources to the one which wins and you'd still have largely the same results as if you didn't.
The reason why Deepseek - it started life as a HFT firm - hit as hard as it did is because it was a cross disciplinary team that had very non-standard skill sets.
I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA engineers away from HFT firms and it was basically impossible. They already make big tech (or higher) salaries without the big tech bullshit - which none of them would ever pass.
> I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA engineers away from HFT firms and it was basically impossible. They already make big tech (or higher) salaries without the big tech bullshit - which none of them would ever pass.
Can confirm. There are downsides, and it can get incredibly stressed at times, but there are all sorts of big tech imposed hoops you don't have to jump through.
> all sorts of big tech imposed hoops you don't have to jump through
Could you kindly share some examples for those of us without big tech experience? I assume you're talking about working practises more than just annoying hiring practises like leetcode?
Engineers at ai labs just come from prestigious schools and don’t have technical depth. They are smart, but they simply aren’t qualified to do deep technical innovation
What are you doing with FPGAs? I’m an FPGA engineer and don’t work at an HFT firm. Those types of jobs seem to be in the minority compared to all the aerospace/defense jobs and other sectors.
> At this point I'm honestly wondering if they aren't just using the interview process to generate high quality validation data for free.
Not sure if that is accurate, but one of the reasons why DeepSeek R1 performs so well in certain areas is thought to be access to China's Gaokao (university entrance exam) data.
Bottom is about to drop out thats why, ethics are out the window already and its gonna be worse as they claw to stay relevant.
Its a niche product that tried to go mainstream and the general public doesn't want it, just look at iPhone 16 sales and Windows 11, everyone is happier with the last version without AI.
They were always going for regulatory capture. I think deepseek shook them but I don't think we should rewrite the history as them being virtuous only until 2024.
>In a 15-page set of policy suggestions released on Thursday, the ChatGPT maker argued that the hundreds of AI-related bills currently pending across the US risk undercutting America’s technological progress at a time when it faces renewed competition from China. OpenAI said the administration should consider providing some relief for AI companies big and small from state rules – if and when enacted – in exchange for voluntary access to models.
The article seems to indicate they want all AI companies to get relief from these laws though.
Tell you what, set up a Federal level disclosure process online of all the copyright protected works used in training OpenAI for the creators / rights holders to get equity (out of the pockets of the C-Suite and Board) via claiming their due, and we’ll take you seriously.
All the profit and none of the liability is Coward Capitalism.
this is a misread. it's still unclear whether use of copyrighted works to train LLMs falls under fair use but, with current laws, the answer is probably yes. you may not like that but, even if it changes, existing models were trained under existing law.
also what liability do you expect them to assume? they want to offer models while saying "to use these, you must agree we don't have liability for their outputs." if companies want to use these models but don't want to deal with liability themselves, so they demand the government shift the liability to the model vendor (despite the conditions the vendor applied), that sounds like coward capitalism to me. don't like it? don't use their models.
Citation needed, or at least some reasoning. The answer to "is this fair use" can't be "it's fair use because it's fair use"
> also what liability do you expect them to assume
The same liability anybody does for distributing copyright works without a license? Why are they not liable if it turns out the stuff they've been distributing and making people pay for was content they didn't own the license to distribute?
All the profit and none of the liability is Coward Capitalism
While I agree with you in principle, there's little that can be done because the current crop of crony capitalists will likely support the idea of no liability for tech companies. Especially when it comes to ripping off copyrighted material. Everything from blog posts, to videos, to music, to any source code you post on the internet will be used to train models to be better writers, artists, musicians, and programmers.
I feel like the only option left is to find some way to make money on the output of the models. Because the politicians are definitely going to allow the models to make money based on your output.
There's an extra word in your last sentence. Privatizing profit and socializing risk and loss is maximizing profit for the individual, and profit maximizing behavior is the only fundamental underpinning of capitalism.
I know a lot of people will hate on things like this, but the reality is they are right that guardrails only serve to hurt us in the long run, at least at this pivotal point in time. I don't like Trump personally as a caveat.
Yes it is a fact they did build themselves up on top of mountains of copyrighted material, and that AI has a lot of potential to do harm, but if they are forced to stop or slow down foreign actors will just push forward and innovate without guardrails and we will just fall behind as the rest of the world pushes forward.
Its easy to see how foreign tech is quickly gaining ground. If they truly cared about still propping America up, they should allow some guardrails to be pushed past.
The law which prevented US corporations from using bribery to win business in other nations was recently rescinded on exactly this basis: US corporations are hamstrung unless they can buy their wins. Superficially, this makes sense, and that was all that was offered to justify the change. That guardrail was dumb! But like most things, there are reasons to not do this which were completely ignored.
For instance, a company may not desire to hand out cash to win business; previously, when solicited they could say, "Sorry, it is illegal for me to do so." Now there is no such shield.
Second, in many cases it will be two or more US businesses trying to win business in some other country, and the change of the law only makes it more expensive for those two companies, as they now must play a game of bribery chicken to win the business.
Third, the US loves to claim it is is a democracy and is working to spread democracy. By legitimizing bribes paid to foreign officials over the interests of their voting populace, we are undermining democracy in those countries (not that anyone who pays attention believes that the US's foreign policy is anything but self interested and divorced from spreading democratic ideals).
Underlying this perspective is the assumption that this is a uni-lineal race, and the end of that race must be arrived at first, and what lies at the end of that race is in the common good. There is no evidence for any of this.
Can the same argument not be made for forced labour?
Is the US not lowering it's capacity to innovate and grow it's economy by preventing the use of forced labour(even in other countries)? Why should these "guardrails" stay in place if the argument is "the reality is they are right that guardrails only serve to hurt us in the long run, at least at this pivotal point in time"?
It probably needs to be a law not an executive order but I don't hate the idea.
States have the power to make it prohibitively expensive to operate in those states, leaving people to either go to VPNs or use AI's hosted in other countries where they don't care if they're not following whatever new AI law California decides to pass. And companies would choose just to use datacenters not in the prohibitive states and ban ips from those states.
Course if a company hosts in us-east-1, and allows access from California, would the inter state commerce clause not take effect and California would have no power anyways?
> Course if a company hosts in us-east-1, and allows access from California, would the inter state commerce clause not take effect and California would have no power anyways?
California can't legislate how they serve a customer in a different state. They would have to comply when serving California customers within the state of California, regardless of where the dc is located. I.E. Under the CCPA it doesn't matter where my data is stored, they still have to delete it upon my request.
>California can't legislate how they serve a customer in a different state. They would have to comply when serving California customers within the state of California, regardless of where the dc is located. I.E. Under the CCPA it doesn't matter where my data is stored, they still have to delete it upon my request.
I know this is what California thinks, I just personally don't see how this isn't inter state commerce.
It is, of course, but that doesn't mean California can't regulate it; simply that federal laws take precedence.
If states couldn't regulate interstate commerce taking place in their own states, they effectively couldn't regulate any commerce because court decisions have found that essentially all economic activity, even growing food for your own consumption, falls under the banner of interstate commerce.
Are you advocating to take the power relegated to the states away from the states and give it to the federal government in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States?
Interstate commerce clause by itself doesn't prevent it; it merely gives Congress the ability to override the state laws if Congress deems it necessary.
Your argument for regulation is...reasons why it works out without regulation, and is already covered by existing regulations?
Granted the "regulation" I'm referring to above is a law or EO to block California's regulation, and I don't support California's regulation either. But I believe regulations should only exist when there's no better alternative, because they usually have unintended consequences. If it's true that OpenAI can basically just leave California, the better alternative for the government may be doing nothing.
JD vance seems to be quite aware of OpenAIs meta strategy so I wouldn't be surprised if this is declined (ie semi specifically aimed at something they want to force them to comply with).
Thank you. I am disappointed that almost none of the comments here discuss the OpenAI proposals on the merits. I do hope that the federal government heeds most of these ideas, particularly recognizing that training a model should be fair use.
The narrative of "regulatory capture" breaks down pretty fast when you see they are arguing all AI companies should be get relief from these laws.
In fact most of the proposal sounds like it could have been written by the US government. Exporting democratic AI, neutralize PRC benefit of American AI, etc.
They should train a model on a clean dataset and copyright dataset, charge extra on the copyright model, and pay a royalty to copyright owners when their works are cited in a response.
The problem there is how are we defining "works are cited"? Also couldn't you just do the same thing done to spotify and make bot farms to generate millions of citations?
But who should pay? The model developers? Training models is a cost center. And what about open source AI, should we legislate it out of existence?
How about the AI providers? they operate on thin margins, and make just cents a million tokens. If one provider is too expensive, users quickly switch.
Maybe the users? Users derive the lion share of benefits from AI. But those benefits are hard to quantize.
Maybe a blanket tax? That would simplify things, but would put all creatives on a quantitative rather than qualitative criteria.
I think generative AI is the worst copyright infringement tool ever devised. It's slow, expensive and imprecise. On the other hand copying is fast, free and perfect. I think nobody can, for science, regurgitate a full book with AI, it won't have fidelity to the original.
The real enemy of any artist is the long tail of works, sometimes spanning decades, that they have to compete against. So it's other authors. That is why we are in an attention economy, and have seen the internet enshittified.
The most creative part of internet ignores copyright royalties. From open source, to wikipedia, open scientific publication and even social networks, if everyone demanded royalties none of them would be possible.
> The most creative part of internet ignores copyright royalties. From open source, to wikipedia, open scientific publication and even social networks, if everyone demanded royalties none of them would be possible.
Notably, in all of these cases the people involved consent to participating.
>> The real enemy of any artist is the long tail of works, sometimes spanning decades, that they have to compete against.
Had to check this wasn’t sama.
You seriously believe the real enemy of artists is other artists? Not the guys making billions and trying to convince us “the computers are just reading it like a human”?
i really don't understand this argument. at which point is it violating copyright versus an intelligence learning and making content the same way as humans?
it was living cells, but they worked as transistors, would it be ok?
it was whole-brain emulation on silicon transistors, would it be ok?
it was a generative AI similar to what we have today, but 100x more sentient and self aware, is that ok?
if you locked a human in a room with nothing but tolkien books for 20 years, then asked them to write a fantasy novel, is that ok?
All art is built on learning from previous art. I don't understand the logic of it being a computer so suddenly now it's wrong and bad. I also don't understand general support of intellectual property when it overwhelmingly benefits the mega wealthy and stifles creative endeavors like nothing else. You art isn't less valuable just because a computer makes something similar, in the same way it's not less valuable if another human copies your style and makes new art in your style.
You "really don't understand" the difference? Do we need to spell out that these systems aren't human artists simply looking at paintings and admiring features about them? They are Python programs running linear algebra libraries, sucking in pixels from anywhere they can find them, and then being used by corporations with billion dollar valuations to increase investor/shareholder value at the expense of the people who provided the artwork to train the systems - people who, as you already know, are NOT paid for providing their work, and who never CONSENTED to having their work used for such a purpose. Now do you "understand the difference"?
AI is a new thing. It's OK to say you don't want it, that it's a threat to livelihoods. But it's a mistake to use these kinds of arguments, that are predicated on such narrow points that overlap so much with human brains.
It's going to be a threat to my career, soon enough — but the threat it poses to me exists even if it never read any of my blog posts or my github repos. Even if it had never read a single line of ObjC or Swift.
> Do we need to spell out that these systems aren't human artists simply looking at paintings and admiring features about them?
In a word, yes.
In more words: explain what it would take for an AI to count as a person — none of what you wrote connects with what was in the comment you replied to.
You dismiss AI as "python": would it help if the maths was done as the pure linear amplification range of the quantum effects in transistors?; you dismiss them as "sucking in pixels from anywhere they can find them" like humans don't spend all day with their eyes open; you complain "corporations with billion dollar valuations to increase investor/shareholder value at the expense of the people who provided the artwork to train the systems" like this isn't exactly what happens with government funded education of humans.
I anticipate that within my lifetime it will be possible for a human brain to be preserved on death, scanned, and the result used as a full brain sim that remembers what the human remembered at the the time of death. Would it matter if the original human had memorised Harry Potter end-to-end and the upload could quote it all perfectly? Would Rowling get the right to delete that brain upload?
I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing mouse neurons on electrode grids to train them to play video games. It's entirely plausible, given the current rate of progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be encoded onto a brain organoid the size of a living mouse's brain — does it magically become OK then? And in 30 years, that same thing as an implant into a human?
The threat to my economic prospects is already present in completely free models whose weights are given away and cannot avail the billion-dollar corporations who made them. I can download free models and run them on my laptop, outputting tokens faster than I can read them for an energy budget lower than my own brain, corporations who made those models don't profit directly by me doing this, and if those corporations go bankrupt I can still run those models.
The risk to my economic value is not because any of these "stole" anything, but because the models are useful and cheap.
GenAI art (and voice) is… well, despite the fact I will admit to enjoying it privately/on free content, whenever I see it on products or blog posts, or when I hear it in the voices on YouTube videos, it's a sign the human behind it has zero budget and therefore whatever it is I don't want to buy it. People already use it because it's cheap, it's a sign of being cheap, signs of cheap are a proxy of generally poor quality.
But that's not going to save my career, nobody's going to decide to boycott all iPhone apps that aren't certified "made by 100% organic grass-fed natural humans with no AI assistance".
So believe me, I get that it's scary. But the arguments you're using aren't good ones.
It seems like you're arguing against some other person you've made up in your mind. I use these systems every single day, but if you don't understand the argument about consent and the extremely obvious difference between Python programs and humans that I already pointed out, then no one can help you. I'll keep making these arguments, because they are good ones, and they are obvious to any human being who isn't stuck in tech-bro fairy land blabbering about how human consciousness is completely identical to Python linear algebra libraries when any 6 year old child knows with certainty they are not.
Your own words suggest this. Many others are more explicit. There are calls for models to be forcibly deleted. Your own statements here about lack of consent are still in this vein.
> No one said "it's scary".
Many, including me, find it so.
> No one is "dismissing them".
You, specifically you, are — "feeling or showing that something is unworthy of consideration".
> if you don't understand the argument about consent and the extremely obvious difference between Python programs and humans that I already pointed out, then no one can help you.
Consent is absolutely an argument I get. It's specifically where I'm agreeing with you.
The other half of that…
Python, like all programming languages, is universal. Python programs can implement physics, so trying to use the argument "because it's implemented on silicon rather than chemistry" is a distinction without a difference.
Quantum mechanics is linear algebra.
> I'll keep making these arguments, because they are good ones, and they are obvious to any human being who isn't stuck in tech-bro fairy land blabbering about how human consciousness is completely identical to Python linear algebra libraries when any 6 year old child knows with certainty they are not.
(An example of you "dismissing" AI).
Then you'll keep being confused and enraged about why people disagree with you.
And not just because you have a wildly wrong understanding of what 6 year olds think about. I remember being 6, all the silly things I believed back then. What my classmates believed falsely. How far most of us were from understanding what algebra was, let alone distinguishing linear algebra from other kinds.
I've got a philosophy A-level, which is enough to know that "consciousness" is a completely unsolved question and absolutely nobody agrees what the minimum requirements are for it. 40 different definitions, we don't even all agree what the question is yet, much less then answer.
But I infer from you bring it up, that you think "consciousness" is an important thing that AI is missing?
Well perhaps it is something current AI miss, something their architecture hasn't got — when we can't agree what the question is, any answer is possible. We evolved it, but just because it can pop up for no good reason doesn't mean it must be present everywhere. (I say much the same to people who are convinced AI must have it: we don't know). So, what if machines are not conscious? Why does that matter?
And you've not answered one of my examples. To repeat:
I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing mouse neurons on electrode grids to train them to play video games. It's entirely plausible, given the current rate of progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be encoded onto a brain organoid the size of a living mouse's brain — does it magically become OK then? And in 30 years, that same thing as an implant into a human?
I don't think that is meaningfully distinct, morally speaking, from doing this in silicon. Making the information alive and in my own brain makes it not python, but all the consent issues remain.
This whole mess is because society decided that restricting everyone's rights to share and access information was a sane tradeoff to make for making sure people got paid. No it is not and, so long as humans are physical, it will never be. It appears that humanity will have to get this simple fact hammered into them with every new leap in technology.
Find another work-rewarding scheme. Ensure you get paid before you release information (e.g. crowd funding or contracts with escrows). Forget about nonsensical concepts relating to "intellectual" property (information is not property). Forget recurring revenue from licensing information. You only get paid once when you do work. You are not entitled to anything more. If reality makes living off your work unworkable, do something else.
I'm glad other countries are starting to wake up and ignore this nonsense. Stop trying make something as unnatural and immoral as this work.
He should have offered for every purchase of OpenAI services, a portion would be used to purchase TrumpCoin. That would have been a more effective bribe.
> OpenAI has asked the Trump administration to help shield artificial intelligence companies from a growing number of proposed state regulations if they voluntarily share their models with the federal government.
It is interesting that it is not the Hollywood/Music/Entertainment copyright lobby (RIAA, MPAA etc.) that is lobbying US states to go after OpenAI and other American AI companies.
It's the New York Times and various journalist and writers' unions that are leading the charge against American AI.
American journalists and opinion piece writers want to kill American AI and let China and Russia have the global lead. Why? Have they taught about the long consequences of what they are doing?
I think content creators want to be compensated for their work that's being used for commercial purposes.
I think you're framing it in a way that makes it seem like they don't want to be compensated for working, they just want to stop other people from starting a new industry, which doesn't seem like a good faith understanding of the situation.
While that is cool in principal, I'm not sure how well it'd actually work in reality. First, there is the technical challenge. My understanding is the weights can have a lot of fluctuation, especially early on. How do we actually determine how much influence a given piece of content has on the final weights?
Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you could game the training. Like have as much of the process happen via public domain sources or pay-once licenses. That would cover a lot of the fundamental knowledge and processes. Then you could fine-tune on copyrighted data. That might actually make it easier to see how much influence on the final weights that content has, but is also would probably be a lot less influence. There's a big difference between a painting of an apple being the main contribution to the concept of "apple" in an image model, vs mention of that painting corresponding to a few weights that just reference a bunch of other concepts that were learned via open data.
> First, there is the technical challenge. My understanding is the weights can have a lot of fluctuation, especially early on. How do we actually determine how much influence a given piece of content has on the final weights?
Well, Bing AI already knows where it drew the information from and cites sources; so it would be a matter of making the deal.
How to enforce it? that's the main question I reckon.
> Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you could game the training. Like have as much of the process happen via public domain sources or pay-once licenses.
The market for creative works breaks down as follows. You have pay-in-advance arrangements such as patronage, commissioning, and so on. Those have been around forever. And then you have pay-if-you-want-it arrangements which only make economic sense because we have laws that grant monopolies to the creators of the work over the market for copies of that work.
The first arrangement is very clearly a labor arrangement; but the second one is a deliberate attempt to force artists to act like capitalists. More importantly, because art is now acting like capital, it provides an obvious economic instinct to centralize[0]. So you get industrialized artistic production under the banner of publishing companies, whose business model is to buy out the copyright to new creative works and then exploit them.
What AI art does is transfer money from the labor side of art to the capital side of art. The MAFIAA[1] wants AI art to exist because it means they can stop paying artists but still make royalties off selling licenses to the AI companies. This increases their profit margins. Meanwhile, the journalists can't sell you old news; they need to spend lots of time and money gathering it every day. That business model only works in a world where writers are scarce, not just the writing itself being artificially scarce.
[0] We can see this with cryptocurrency, which is laughably centralized despite being a deliberate attempt to decentralize money.
[1] Music and Film Industry Association of America, a hypothetical merger of the RIAA and MPAA from a satirical news article
With these proposed rules, American AI may be able to surpass the AI of China and Russia, but will American creators and ordinary people be happy with this, because all the money will end up in the pockets of Sam Altman and other billionaires, and ordinary creators will be left with nothing?
> It is interesting that it is not the Hollywood/Music/Entertainment copyright lobby (RIAA, MPAA etc.)
Is it interesting? They hate the people who produce their product and are desperate to replace them with machines. Note that their unions also hate AI, and it was a central reason for for the Writer's Guild SAG-AFTRA strike, since you're bringing up the NYT unions.
The NYT also stands to benefit not an iota from AI. It probably causes a burden because they have to make sure that their awful long-in-the-tooth editorial columnists aren't turning in LLM slop. It is entirely a negative for people who generate high quality content the hard way.
I heard the theory that Elon Musk has a significant control over the current US government. They're not best pals with Sam Altman. This seems like it might be a good way to see how much power Elon actually has over the government?
I think we are beyond the "theory" phase by now. Just yesterday I saw the president of a country advertising the products of a private company (Trump making an obvious marketing ploy for Tesla).
The failure relative to the original expectations seems to be that the other branches of government aren't fighting to retain their authority because the things they're being overridden to do align too well with what they would do themselves.
> the president of a country advertising the products of a private company
I think you're inventing new norms. It has never been unusual or interesting for the president of a country to do PR for some company in their country that has hit a rough patch (as long as this isn't a legal rough patch.)
Most of what our diplomats do is sell US products to other countries. They certainly have always played favorites.
> How can this ever be acceptable?
The horror. What if he says that he's going to Burger King?
Trump has ultimate power in the administration. You are either dumb or blind if you cannot see that Trump is running the executive branch like a mob family. Kiss the leader, show him respect, and he will do things for you. Betray him, ignore him, or go behind his back and you will be squashed.
People might think this is a partisan statement, but it's not. It's simply how he is operating. Want power? Want to get things done? Kiss his feet. You saw all the tech boys line up at his inauguration. You saw him tell Zelenskyy "Thank me". Elon might have power, but he is also on a leash.
I have a working theory is that the current Trump government is like 12 people, a quarter of which do not hold any official position, and they decide everyting with absolutely no oversight.
Trump did this during his previous term as well, with Ivanka and Jared Kushner, but to a much less significant degree.
You say that, but the reality is that all open models rely heavily on synthetic data generated with ChatGPT. They don't like it, but it happens anyway. You can't really protect a public model from having its outputs exfiltrated.
This started in 2023 when LLaMA 1 was released, and has been going strong ever since. How strong? there are 330K datasets on HuggingFace, many of them generated from OpenAI.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 421 ms ] threadOpenAI urges Trump administration to remove guardrails for the industry (cnbc.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43354324
Totally not the fault of a gigantic overcommitment based on wishing, no.
Forget what they called it, united something or other.
Maybe our AI overlords will do a better job this time if they are unconstrained from any lawful oversight. I mean, one can hope...
Centralizing production goals, decision making, and expenditure at the Federal government is what made the industrial response to WW2 successful. Centralizing tax revenue to fund retirements for the elderly (Social Security) resulted in the poverty rate of seniors being brought far lower. Centralizing zoning control at the state of California is _finally_ starting to make localities take responsibility for building more housing. These were/are centralizing efforts with the intent of helping the masses over the wealthy few.
What doesn't work is centralizing power with the intent of concentrating wealth and security by taking wealth, labor, and security from working people, AKA extractive institutions.
That's true whether it's the donor-class funded political establishment or regimes like the current US kleptocracy doing it.
Generally speaking, every point of centralization is also a point where a lot of power can be acquired with relatively little resources. So regardless of intent, it attracts people who are into power, and over time, they take over. The original intent often remains symbolically and in the rhetoric used, but when you look beyond that into the actual policies, they are increasingly divorced from what is actually claimed.
This is why (1) shared principles and (2) credible democracy is important, to allow evolution of the centralized power (i.e. government) towards the shared principles, and why its corporate-bribed facsimile or oligarchic authoritarianism don't work.
Or you can have a bunch of smaller assemblies that actually are representative, and then a larger one to which assemblies delegate their own to cooperate. But that's exactly political decentralization - a multi-level federation.
Over a long period of time the interest of the powerful will always win. There is a reason if no government (whether left or right) can fix the situation and inequality between the top 0.01% and the rest keeps increasing.
The only solution to maximise wellbeing for individuals is to reduce the amount of control the powerful can exert on the rest of society.
Why would centralizing power in a different way(e.x. democratically) not lead to a different outcome than centralizing power in the way we do now?
That's what we're getting with "democracy" because ultimately swaying the opinion of a lot of people (in this technological time) requires money. No wonder the powerful elite or their puppets end up making decision for the majority.
No, what I advocate for is for decentralisation of power, I don't want any central entity making choices for me.
Someone with capital should be able to offer to buy me out but they shouldn't be able to tax me or decide what happens to me or my property.
This is tech. This is how it has always been. From Archemedes to DaVinci to Edison to Ford, technologists are always captured to serve the interests of those in power. Most modern technologists don't want to believe this. They grew up building an Internet that had a bit of countercultural flair to it and undermined a few subsets of entrenched elites (mass media, taxi cartels, etc.), so they convinced themselves that they could control society under their wise hands. Except the same thing that always happened happened: the powers that be are now treating tech the way tech treats everyone else.
Das kapital, as a critique to Smith's writing.
Communist manifesto, to understand the point of the laborer, and not capital.
Read about worker cooperatives and democracy in the workplace, including Mondragon corp in Spain.
(One of the largest problems we have with any economic system is that none can properly model infinites. The cost of creating new is expensive be it art or science. But cost of copying is effectively 0. I can highlight the problem, but I have no good solution. But OpenAI's response is 'let us ignore copyright law' which wrongs creators.)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-investors-reject-pr...
https://news.sky.com/story/apple-removes-end-to-end-security...
Perhaps also symmetric "freedom to learn" from OpenAI models, with some provisions / naming convention? U.S. labs are limited in this way, while labs in China are not.
Really? Or do they get sued for sharing as in republishing without transformation? Arguably a URL providing copyrighted content, is you offering a xerox machine.
It seems most "sued into oblivion" are the reshare problem, not the get one for myself problem.
Now, if you have eidetic memory and write out large chunks of the book from memory and publish them, that's what you could be sued for.
They're not talking about reading a book FFS. You absolutely can be sued for illegally obtaining a copy of the book.
What these companies are doing is:
1. Obtain a free copy of a work in some way.
2. Store this copy in a format that's amenable to training.
3. Train their models on the stored copy, months or years after step 1 happened.
The illegal part happens in steps 1 and/or 2. Step 3 is perhaps debatable - maybe it's fair to argue that the model is learning in the same sense as a human reading a book, so the model is perhaps not illegally created.
But the training set that the company is storing is full of illegally obtained or at least illegally copied works.
What they're doing before the training step is exactly like building a library by going with a portable copier into bookshops and creating copies of every book in that bookshop.
Even web browsing implies making copies of copyrighted pages, we can't tell the copyright status of a page without loading it, at which point a copy has been made in memory.
If this was legal, nobody would be paying for software.
What about movies and music?
No, but you can read a book, learn its contents, and then write and publish your own book to teach the information to others. The operation of an AI is rather closer to that than it is to copyright violation.
"Should" there be protections against AI training? Maybe! But copyright law as it stands is woefully inadequate to the task, and IMHO a lot of people aren't really treating with this. We need a functioning government to write well-considered laws for the benefit of all here. We'll see what we get.
Nothing in my sentence constrains my ability to teach someone else the stuff I learned, though! In fact, the first amendment makes it pretty damn clear that nothing can constrain that freedom.
Also, note that the example is malformed: in almost all these cases, Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway. They're downloading and reading stuff on the internet that is available for free. If you or I can't be prosecuted for reading a preprint from arXiv.org or whatever, it's a very hard case to make that an AI can.
Again, copyright isn't the tool here. We need better laws.
It's not the only tool. I agree that "use for ML" should be an additional right.
What people are pissed about is that copyright only ever serves to constrain the little guys.
> If I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime of theft
You or I would never dare to do this in the first place.
It's perhaps arguable whether it's OK for an LLM to be trained on freely available but licensed works, such as the Linux source code. There you can get in arguments about learning vs machine processing, and whether the LLM is a derived work etc
But it's not arguable that copying a book that you have not even bought to store in your corporate data lake to later use for training is a blatant violation of basic copyright. It's exactly like borrowing a book from a library, photocopying it, and then putting it in your employee-only corporate library.
They were caught downloading the entirety of libgen.
if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers would absolutely love to hear about it.
Lol, so why are OpenAI challenging these laws?
The part of that which doesn't apply is "print copies", at least not complete copies, but libraries often have photocopiers in them for fragments needed for research.
AI models shouldn't do that either, IMO. But unlimited complete copies is the mistake the Internet Archive made, too.
Is having a library card a requirement for being hired over there?
You also don't need permission, as a human, to read (and learn from) the internet in general. Machines by standard practice require such permission, hence robots.txt, and OpenAI's GPTBot complies with the robots.txt file and the company gives advice to web operators about how to disallow their bot.
How AI should be treated, more like a search index, or more like a mind that can learn by reading? Not my call. It's a new thing, and laws can be driven by economics or by moral outrage, and in this case those two driving forces are at odds.
Sidenote: I wouldn't even be mad if OpenAI built robots to go into all of the libraries and read all of the books. That would be amazing!
The argument for both is identical, your objection is specific to libraries.
IIRC, Google already did your sidenote. Or started to, may have had legal issues.
How so? I don't have to pay to read most websites. To read most books I have to pay (or a library has to pay and I have to wait to get the book).
> IIRC, Google already did your sidenote
Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and have humans feed them into scanners. I'm talking about a robot that can walk (or roll) into a library, use arms to take books off the shelves, turn the pages and read them without putting them into a scanner.
https://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com/
"or" does a lot of work, even ignoring that I'd already linked you to a page about deposit libraries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit
Fact is, you can read books for free, just as you can read (many but not all) websites for free. And in both cases you're allowed to use what you learned without paying ongoing licensing fees for having learned anything from either, and even to make money from what you learn.
> Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and have humans feed them into scanners.
Your statement is over 20 years out of date: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7508978B1/en
Have you never been to a public library and read a book while sitting there without checking it out? Clearly, age is a factor here, and us olds are confused by this lack of understanding of how libraries function. I did my entire term paper without ever checking out books from the library. I just showed up with my stack of blank index cards, then left with the necessary info written on them. Did an entire project on tracking stocks by visiting the library and viewing all of the papers for the days in one sitting rather than being schmuck and tracking it daily. Took me about an hour in one day. No library card required.
Also, a library card is ridiculously cheap even if you did decide to have one.
I'm in no way justifying anything about GPT/LLM training. I'm just calling out that these comparisons are extremely strained.
Also I think it is different thing when someone uses copyrighted works for research and publishing a paper or when someone uses copyrighted works to earn money.
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355723. If OpenAI built a robot that physically went into libraries, pulled books off shelves by itself, and read them...that's so cool I wouldn't even be mad.
theGoogs essentially did that by having the robot that turned each page and scanned the pages. that's no different than having the librarian pull material for you so that you don't have to pull the book from the shelf yourself.
There's better arguments to make on why ClosedAI is bad. Reading text it doesn't own isn't one of them. How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique. There's laws for that in place now that does not require new laws to be enacted.
You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem?
> How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique
Well...yeah that's what I said in the comment that started this discussion branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355147
This isn't about humans or robots reading books. It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read the books, and us humans are not.
In precisely the same way as a robot scanning a physical book is.
If this is turned into a PDF and distributed, it's exactly the legal problem Google had[0] and that Facebook is currently fighting due to torrenting some of their training material[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125840
If the tokens go directly into training an AI and no copies are retained, that's like how you as a human learn — except current AI models are not even remotely as able to absorb that information as you, and they only make up for being as thick as a plank by being stupid very very quickly.
> It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read the books, and us humans are not.
More that the copyright laws are not suited to what's going on. Under the copyright laws, statute and case law, that existed at the time GPT-3.5 was created, bots were understood as the kind of thing Google had and used to make web indexes — essentially legal, with some caveats about quoting too much verbatim from news articles.
(Google PageRank being a big pile of linear algebra and all, and the Transformer architecture from which ChatGPT get's the "T" being originally a Google effort to improve Google Translate).
Society is currently arguing amongst itself if this is still OK when the bot is a conversational entity, or perhaps even something that can be given agency.
You get to set those rules via your government representative, make it illegal for AI crawlers to read the internet like that — but it's hard to change the laws if you mistake what you want the law to be, with what the law currently is.
1. Can't
Or
2. Rely on fair use to protect you (archival by individuals isn't necessarily fair use)
The fair use criteria considers whether it is commercial in nature (in this case it is not) and the “ the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work” for which a personal copy of a personally owned book is non existent.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep.
There's no legal precedent for this. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356042
> the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
A copyright holder's lawyer would argue that having and using a photocopy of a book keeps the original from wearing out. This directly affects the potential market for the work, since the owner could resell the book in mint condition, after reading and burning their photocopies.
> You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep.
I mean maybe this is true. But the affected individual will have a very bad year and spend a ton of money on lawyers.
Why do you interpret this to mean "absolutely can't do this"? "No precedent" seems to equally support both sides of the argument (that is, it provides no evidence; courts have not ruled). The other commenters arguments on the actual text of the statute seem more convincing to me than what you have so far provided.
> The other commenters arguments...seem more convincing
Because you (and I) want it to be fair use. But as I already said in my comment, it potentially fails one leg of fair use. Keeping your purchased physical copy of the book pristine and untouched while you read the photocopy allows you to later, after destroying the copies you made, resell the book as new or like-new. This directly affects the market for that book.
Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out if it's really fair use? That's what "no precedent" means.
No. I'd much rather pirate the epub followed by lobbying for severe IP law reform. (Of course by "lobby" I actually mean complain about IP law online.)
If there's no epub available then I guess it's time to get building. (https://linearbookscanner.org/)
And whether or not I am personally interested in testing any of these opinions is completely beside the point.
The idea that photocopying a book for archival purposes is potentially fair use is an untested opinion. I'm not denigrating that opinion. I just think it's likely to fail as an legal argument in the unlikely event that it comes up. I'm not a copyright apologist.
I myself believed the "fair use for archival"/"format shifting" thing applied to all works for most of my life. I only learned there was no law or precedent like 10 days ago.
Such a case would not require a year or a ton of money to defend. In fact, the potential damages would be so small that you could sensibly do it in small claims court.
I mean copyright law has always been "You can't make full copies for any reason (almost)". And you were the one saying "it absolutely is fair use [to make full personal copies]", which is quite a strong statement to make in the absence of a precedence.
An archive could argue fair use to make full copies of physical works, because that's their role, and by keeping the copies locked away they don't harm the market for the works. These fair use factors don't apply to individuals. But IANAL and maybe that's wrong, who knows? I do know if it comes up the copyright mafia will fight it tooth and nail, and I'd put my money on them winning.
> the potential damages would be so small that you could sensibly do it in small claims court
The publisher would sue the infringer in small claims court? This seems very unlikely since the publisher would prefer to scare or bankrupt you into submission.
Or would the defendant have the lawsuit moved to small claims court? Are defendants allowed to do this?
17 U.S.C. § 107 is the fair use carveout.
Interestingly, digitizing and copying a book on your own, for your own private use, has also not been brought to court. Major rights holders seem to not want this particular fair use precedent to be established, which it likely would be, and might then invalidate crucial standing for other cases in which certain interpretations of fair use are preferred.
Digitally copying media you own is fair use. I'll die on that hill. It doesn't grant commercial rights, you can't resell a copy as if it were the original, and so on, and so forth.
There's even a good case to be made that sharing a digitally copied work purchased legally, even to millions of people, 5 years after a book is first sold - for a vast majority of books, after 5 years, they've sold about 99.99% of the copies they're going to sell.
By sharing after the ~5 year mark, you're arguably doing marketing for the book, and if we cultivated a culture of direct donation to authors and content creators, it invalidates any of the reasons piracy is made illegal in the first place.
Right now publishers, studios, and platforms have a stranglehold on content markets, and the law serves them almost exclusively. It is exceedingly rare for the law to be invoked in defending or supporting an author or artist directly. It's very common for groups of wealthy lawyers LARPing as protectors of authors and artists to exploit the law and steal money from regular people.
Exclusively digital content should have a 3 year protected period, while physical works should get 5, whether it's text, audio, image, or video.
Once something is outside the protected period, it should be considered fair game for sharing until 20 years have passed, at which point it should enter public domain.
Copyright law serves two purposes - protecting and incentivizing content creators, and serving the interests of the public. Situations where a bunch of lawyers get rich by suing the pants off of regular people over technicalities is a despicable outcome.
Thank you! I had looked this up myself last week, so I knew this. I had long believed, as GP does, that copying anything you own without distribution is either allowed or fair use. I wanted GP to learn as I did.
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
The spirit seems apparent, but in practice it's been used by awful people to destroy lives and exploit rent from artists and authors in damn near tyrannical ways.
Given all this "can't do it" is more probably accurate than "can do it". IANAL but it's not like the question is finely balanced on a knife's edge and could go either way.
> IANAL but it's not like the question is finely balanced on a knife's edge and could go either way.
I agree, but my interpretation is opposite yours. It seems fairly obvious to me that the spirit of the law permits personal copies. That also seems to be in line with (explicitly legislated) digital practices.
But at the end of the day the only clearly correct statement on the matter is "there's no precedent, so we don't know". I suppose it's also generally good advice to avoid the legal quagmire if possible. Being in the right is unlikely to do you any good if it bankrupts you in the process.
That's the whole point of copyright: only the owner of a copyright has the right to make copies. I don't see how it can be more explicit than that. It's a default-deny policy.
There is an archival exception for digital media, so obviously Congress is open to granting exceptions for backup purposes. They chose not to include physical media in this exception.
You are conveniently omitting the provisions about fair use, which is strange since you're clearly aware of them. The only things copyright is reasonably unambiguous about are sale and distribution. Even then there's lots of grey areas such as performance rights.
You are arguing that something is obviously disallowed but have nothing but your own interpretation to back that up. If the situation was as clear cut as you're trying to make out then where is the precedent showing that personal use archival copies of physical goods are not permitted?
> They chose not to include physical media in this exception.
That's irrelevant to the current discussion, though I'm fairly certain you realize that. Congress declined to weigh in on the matter which (as you clearly know) leaves it up to the courts to interpret the existing law.
Fair use didn't come up but I did mention it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356289. And there's no need for that tone. I'm not a copyright defender.
> That's irrelevant to the current discussion, though I'm fairly certain you realize that.
I said it because it was relevant.
> where is the precedent showing that personal use archival copies of physical goods are not permitted
> Congress declined to weigh in on the matter
There was no "matter" to "weigh in on". The answer to "Can you make a full, complete copy of a copyrighted work without authorization?" has been "Almost always no" from the beginning of copyright. Even the term "fair use" arose in a US legal precedent over a century after the first copyright laws in England. It became an actual part of US copyright law in the 1970s, less than 50 years ago.
"Fair use" is plausible for a library or archive to make full copies, and keep them safe and archived, since that's their job.
Fair use isn't why we have archival rights for electronic media. That right was written into the law after electronic media became a thing.
In my comment above I gave one example why "fair use" wouldn't work for archival copies of physical media made by individuals. An actual lawyer who's paid by the copyright mafia to care about this stuff can surely find more and stronger reasons.
FWIW someone in another comment pointed out Australian copyright law allows making a copy of books, newspapers, and periodicals for personal, domestic use. Which means: a) it can be done and b) even they had to spell it out specifically
> which (as you clearly know) leaves it up to the courts to interpret the existing law.
I don't agree but believe what you like.
What part of fair use pertains to making a physical copy of the complete work?
(Copyright Act 1968 Part III div. 1, section 43C) https://www.legislation.gov.au/C1968A00063/latest/text
You cannot legally photocopy copy an entire book even if you own a physical copy.
Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal argument or case law to support that.
One of the six exclusive rights of copyright holders is "to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords."
(In certain circumstances, the Fair Use doctrine contravenes this right, but reproduction in whole is not such a circumstance.)
Quite the opposite. The burden of proof is on you to show a single person ever, in history, who has been prosecuted for that.
If nobody in the world has ever been prosecuted for this, then that means it is either legal, or it is something else that is so effectively equivalent to "legal" that there is little point in using a different word.
If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its legal, technically!"
Then I guess go ahead. But for those in the real world, those two things are almost equivalent.
> Then I guess go ahead.
That is exactly what I am saying.
If you do this, you are not going to be held legally liable for anything.
That’s not the point. It’s about books you don’t own. Are you allowed to download books from Z-Library, Sci-Hub etc. because you want to learn?
He and Sam Altman were in the same YC class. OpenAI is doing the same thing at a larger scale, and their technology actually reproduces and distributes copyrighted material. It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.
https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
Cynically, I imagine it will not but I hope that it could.
Not the downloading with intent
And apparently the most controversial take on this community is the observation that many people would have done the trial, plea and time, regardless of how overzealous the prosecution was
"The closet's door was kept unlocked, according to press reports"
When's the last time a kid with no record, a research fellow at Harvard, got threatened with 35 years for a simple B&E?
Its the plea or sentencing where that stuff gets taken into account for a reduction to community service
> It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.
Scraping the Internet is generally very different from piracy. You are given a limited right to that data when you access it, and you can make local copies. if further use does something sufficiently non-copying, then creator rights aren't being infringed.
At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes infringement?
Define access?
If you mean sending out the compressed copy, generally no. For things people normally call compression.
If you want to run a search engine, then you should be fine.
> At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes infringement?
It would have to be very very lossy.
But some AI stuff is. For example there are image models with fewer parameters than source images. Those are, by and large, not able to store enough data to infringe with. (Copying can creep in with images that have multiple versions, but that's a small sliver of the data.)
Also, as I understand they didn't even buy the CDs with music for training; they got it somewhere else. Why do organizations that prosecute people for downloading a movie do not want to look if it is ok to make a business on illegal copies of copyrighted works?
Like cliff's notes.
The fundamental contention is that both accessed, saved and distributed material that they didn't have a "right" to access, save, and distribute. One was made a billionaire for it and another was driven to suicide. It's not tragic, it's societal malpractice.
To actually get that maximum typically requires things like the person is a repeat offender, drug dealing was involved, people were physically harmed, it involved organized crime, it involved terrorism, a large amount of money was involved, or other things that make it an unusual big and serious crime.
The DOJ knows exactly what they are alleging the defendant did. They could easily looks at the various factors that affect sentencing for the charge and see which apply to that case and come up with a realistic number but that doesn't make it sound as impressive in the press release.
Another thing that inflates the numbers in the press releases is that defendants are often charged with several related charges. For many crimes there are groups of related charges that for sentencing get merged. If you are charged with say 3 charges from the same group and convicted on all you are only sentenced for whichever one of them has the longest sentence.
If you've got 3 charges from such a group in the press release the DOJ might just take the completely bogus maximum for each as described above and just add those 3 together.
Here's a good article on DOJ's ridiculous sentence numbers [1].
Here's a couple of articles from an expert in this area of law that looks specifically at what Swartz was charged with and what kind of sentence he was actually looking at [2][3].
Why do you think Swartz was downloading the articles to learn from them? As far as I've seen know one knows for sure what he was intending.
If he wanted to learn from JSTOR articles he could have downloaded them using the JSTOR account he had through his research fellowship at Harvard. Why go to MIT and use their public JSTOR WiFi access, and then when that was cut off hide a computer in a wiring closet hooked into their ethernet?
I've seen claims that he wanted to do was meta research about scientific publishing as a whole which could explain why he needed to download more than he could download with his normal JSTOR account from Harvard, but again why do that using MIT's public WiFi access? JSTOR has granted more direct access to large amounts of data for such research. Did he talk to them first to try to get access that way?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230107080107/https://www.popeh...
[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...
For context, according to sources, he downloaded 4.8 million articles.
So it's totally OK to rip off and steal and lie through your teeth AND do it all for money, if you're a company. But if you're a human being, doing it not for profit but for the betterment of your own fellow humans, you deserve to be imprisoned and systematically murdered and driven to suicide.
The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?", and under US copyright law, the answer is: Yes.
The analogous scenario is actually "Can I read a book that I obtained illegally and face no consequences for obtaining it illegally?" The answer is "Yes" there are no consequences for reading said book, for individuals or machines.
But individuals can face serious consequences for obtaining it illegally. And corporations are trying to argue those consequences shouldn't apply to them.
Can they? Who has ever faced serious consequences for pirating books in the US?
(Please no pedantry about how scientific papers aren't books)
Asking because I genuinely don't know. I believe all I've ever read about persecution of "commonplace" copyright violations was either about distributors or tied to bidirectional nature of peer-to-peer exchange (torrents typically upload to others even as you download = redistribution).
A tiny fraction compared to the 80+ terabytes Facebook downloaded.
>Did he publish the stuff too?
No.
> Not sure if it’s worth a violation .
Exactly.
Me taking over control of the lemonade market in my neighbourhood wouldn't ever be a problem to anyone, a very minor annoyance; instead if I managed to corner the lemonade market of a whole continent it'd be a very different thing.
Yes, you can read books without paying, if that's how it is offered.
And you can photocopy books you own for your own personal use. But again....the analogy is remembering/leaning from a book.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224450/anthropic-copyri...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-sued-by-top-...
musicians can read the sheet music and memorize how to play it, and no longer need the music. they still have the information.
There's two angles to the lawsuits that are getting confused - the largest one from the book publishers (Sarah Silverman et al) attacked from the angle that the models could reproduce copyrighted information. This was pretty easily quelled / RHLF'd out (used to be that if ChatGPT started producing lyrics a supervisor/censor would just cut off it's response early - tried it now and ChatGPT.com is now more eloquent, "Sorry, I can't provide the full lyrics to "Strawberry Fields Forever" as they are copyrighted. However, I can summarize the song or discuss its themes, meaning, and history if you're interested!")
But there's also the angle of "why does OpenAI have Sarah Silverman's book on their hard drive if they never paid her for it? This is the lawsuit against Meta regarding books3 and torrenting, seems like they're getting away with the "we never redistributed/seeded!" but it's unclear to me why this is a defense against copyright infringement.
This whole mess seems to be another case of "if I can dance around the law fast enough, big enough, and with enough grey areas then I can get away with it".
The school and library purchased the materials outright, again, OpenAI Meta et al never paid to read them, nor borrowed them from an institution that had any right to share.
I'm a bit of an anti intellectual property anarchist myself but it grinds my gears that, given that we do live under the law, it is applied unequally.
And if you sell the outputs of your model that you trained on free content, you shouldn't be able to hide behind trade secret.
It is not remotely the same, the companies training the models are stealing the content from the internet and then profiting from it when they charge for the use of those models.
Are you stealing a billboard when you see and remember it?
The notion that consuming the web is "stealing" needs to stop.
But the courts will get to clarify (in today's news):
https://www.reuters.com/legal/news-corp-sued-by-brave-softwa...
LLMs do indeed significantly reduce the incentive to produce original work.
The general concept of "warp drive" was introduced by John W. Campbell in 1957, "Islands of Space". Popularised by Trek, turned into maths by Alcubierre. Islands of Space feels like it took inspiration from both H G Wells (needing to explain why the War of the Worlds' ending was implausible) and Jules Verne (gang of gentlemen have call-to-action, encounter difficulties that would crush them like a bug and are not merely fine, they go on to further great adventure and reward).
Terry Pratchett had obvious inspirations from Shakespeare, Ringworld, Faust (in the title!).
In the pandemic I read "The Deathworlders" (web fic, not the book series of similar name), and by the time I'd read too many shark jumps to continue, I had spotted many obvious inspirations besides just the one that gave the name.
If I studied medieval lit, I could probably do the same with Shakespeare's inspiration.
Did OpenAI bought one copy of each book, or did they legaly borowed athe books and documents ?
if you copy paste rom books and claim is your content you are plagiarizing. LLMs were provent to copy paste trained content so now what? Should only big Tech be excluded from plagiarizing ?
Not really. You can't multiply yourself a million times to produce content at an industrial scale.
On the other hand, they aren’t just a copy of the training content, and whether the process that creates the weights is sufficiently transformative as to create a new work is… what’s up for debate, right?
Anyway I wish people would stop making these analogies. There isn’t a law covering AI models yet. It is a big industry at this point, and the lack of clarity seems like something we’d expect everybody (legislators and industry) to want to rectify.
Sure, that’s why don’t like the analogy.
> What happens is a human obtains "a free copy" of a copyrighted work, processes it using a machine and sells the result.
Right, so for example it is pretty common to snip up small bits of songs and to use in other songs (sampling). Maybe that could be an example of somewhere to start? But, these ML models seem quite different, I guess because the “samples” are much smaller and usually not individually identifiable. And really the model encodes information about trends in the sources… I dunno. I still think we need a new law.
This discussion reminds me of it.
Conceptually, AI basically zeros out existing IP, and makes the AI the only IP that has any value. It is hard to imagine large rights holders and courts accepting that.
The likely outcome is that courts rule against LLM creators/providers and they eventually have to settle on licensing fees with large corporate copyright holders similar to YouTube. Unlike YouTube though, this would open up LLM companies to class action lawsuits from the general public, and so it could be a much worse outcome for them.
Maybe terrorist manuals and some child pornography, but what else?
If a human buys a movie, he can watch it and learn about its contents, and then talk about those contents, and he can create a similar movie with a similar theme.
If OpenAI buys a movie and shows it to their model, it's unclear whether the model can talk about the contents of the movie and create a similar movie with a similar theme.
Since "buying" a movie (as it currently applies to humans) is just buying a limited license to it for private viewing, can't the copyright holder opt to limit the $4.99 license terms to human viewing, and charge $4999 for an AI training license?
Or OpenAI could buy movies the way Disney does, by buying the actual copyright to the film.
the Reddit data licensing model
That's exactly what already happens currently. Buying a movie on DVD doesn't give you the right to present it for hundreds of people. You need to pay for a public performance license or commercial licence. This is why a TV network or movie theatre can't just buy a DVD at Walmart and then show the movie as often as it likes.
Copyright doesn't just grant exclusive distribution rights. It grants exclusive use rights as well, and permits the owner to control how their work is used. Since AI rights are not granted by any existing licenses, and license terms generally reserve any rights not explicitly specified, feeding copyrighted works into an AI data model is a reserved right of the owner.
The model gets to use training data of all humans.
But if you use the model as training data OAI will say you’re infringing T&Cs
Acting like copyright is some natural law of the universe that LLMs are upending simply because they can learn from written texts is silly.
If you want to argue that it should be radically expanded to the point that not only a work, but even the ideas and knowledge contained in that work should be censored and restricted, fine. But at least have the honesty to admit that this is a radical new expansion for a body of law that has already been radically expanded relatively recently.
It was also invented to keep the publishing houses under control and keep them from papering the land in anti-crown propaganda (like the stuff that fueled the civil war in England and got Charles I beheaded).
Probably one of the biggest brewing fights will be whether the models are free to tell the truth or whether they'll be mouthpieces for the ruling class. As long as they play ball with the powers that be, I predict copyrights won't be a problem at all for the chosen winners.
That's actually a great point. Judging from the current state of media, there is a clear momentum to take sides in moral arguments. Maybe the standard for models need to be a fair use clause?
What are you talking about.
I’m annoyed by arguments like the above because they’re clearly derived from working backwards from a desired conclusion; in this case, that someone’s original work can be consumed and repurposed to create profit by someone else. Our laws and society have determined this to be illegal; the fact that it would be con isn’t for OpenAI if it weren’t has no bearing.
Elephant in the room. If copyright and patent both expired after 20 years or so then I might feel very differently about the system, and by extension about machine learning practices.
It's absurd to me that broad cultural artifacts which we share with our parent's (or even grandparent's) generation can be legally owned.
> not only a work, but even the ideas and knowledge contained in that work
AI models reproduce existing audio tracks when asked, although in a distorted and low-quality form.
Also it will be funny to observe how US government will try to ignore violating copyright for AI while issuing ridiculous fines for torrenting a movie by ordinary citizens.
Breakout success can still be achieved from humans who create brand new art styles that can't yet be replicated by an AI. These artists will reap the rewards until all of these works are added to the subsequent AI training models.
We work in an industry built on leveraging unfairness. Expecting otherwise on this forum is very odd.
Yet this forum is very quick to criticize other people and other industries for unfairness.
So can my wife. Who should I call to have her taken away?
The late OpenAI researcher and whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, wrote an excellent article regarding this topic:
https://suchir.net/fair_use.html
IP and copyright exist.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
https://abounaja.com/blog/intellectual-property-disputes
Copyright cartels (RIAA, MPAA) that monetized young artists without paying them much at all [1], vs the AI megalomaniacs who took all the work for free and used Kenyans at $2 an hour [2] so that they can raise "$7 trillion" for their AI infrastructure
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/comments/1fzyr0u/arti...
[2] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
But that does make me think, that in a sane society with a functional legislature I wouldn't have to pick a dog in this fight. I'd have have enough faith in lawmakers and the political process to pursue a path towards copyright reform that reigns in abuses from both AI companies and megacorp rightsholders
Alas, for now I'm hoping that aforementioned megacorps sue OpenAI into a painful lesson.
The same megacorps are suing Internet Archive for their collection of 78rpm records. These guys would rather see art orphaned and die.
More generally the best we can hope for us to discourage concentrated power, both in government and corporate forms.
And what they actually did is violate the requirement to have a physical copy of the book they were lending.
As I understand it, they did not offer anything new that wasn't available to loan prior.
I could be wrong. But if I'm not, I see no reason to lambast IA.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its...
I don't doubt it but am interested to read a source? I know the models can't talk about things like Tiananmen Square 1989, but what does 'implementing socialist values by law' look like?
"Socialist values" is literally the language that China used in announcing this.
Here is a recent article from a Chinese source:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202503/1329537.shtml
Although censorship isn't mentioned specifically, it is definitely 99% of what they are focused on (the other 1% being scams).
China practices Rule by law, not Rule of law, so you know...they'll know its bad when they see it, so model providers will exercise extreme self censorship (which is already true for social network providers).
In practice the US is less different than you imply. For the vast majority of Americans, being sued is a punishment in and of itself due to the prohibitive costs of hiring a lawyer. In the US we have a right to a “speedy” trial but there are many people sitting in jail now because they can’t afford the bail get out. Speedy could mean months.
I say this because when we constantly fall so far short of our ideals, one begins to question if those are really our ideals.
Can you share where you saw this? I am also not aware of anywhere that the US has stated that rule of law is a goal. What you are referring to is more of a norm or tradition. And norms can and do change over time for better or worse.
You could argue that rule of law follows from the preamble to the constitution but that doesn’t explicitly mention rule of law either. It mentions various values like justice and tranquility.
> The aim is to use the law as a political instrument to make the state more efficient and to reduce the arbitrariness of how the law is applied for the majority of the population, among other things, with the help of advanced technology. In some areas, for example on procedural issues, Beijing continues to draw inspiration from the West in establishing its Chinese “rule of law”. However, the party-state leadership rejects an independent judiciary and the principle of separation of powers as “erroneous western thought”. Beijing is explicitly interested in propagating China’s conception of law and legal practice internationally, establishing new legal standards and enforcing its interests through the law. Berlin and Brussels should, therefore, pay special attention to the Chinese leadership’s concept of the law. In-depth knowledge on this topic will be imperative in order to grasp the strategic implications of China’s legal policy, to better understand the logic of their actions and respond appropriately.
This is mostly transcribed from those meetings (vs a westerner interpretation). You really need to understand this to get how the legal systems are different, and how party officials are basically given supreme power (only checked by their bosses).
Here is some (non-empiric) displayed data: https://trackingai.org/political-test
Here is some research on that matter: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08640 Here is more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...
Look it at literally who will have GPU dominance in future. (obv who will hit Qbit at scale... but we are at this scale now - and control currently is controlled by policy, then bits, then Qbits.)
Remember, we are witnessing the "Wouldnt it be cool if..?" CyberPunk manifestations of our Cyberpunk Readings of youth?
((I buildt a bunch of shit that spied on you because I read NeuroMancer, and thought wouldnt it be cool if..."
And then I helped build Ono Sendai throughout my career...
Have we all been transported to bizzaro land?
Different rules for billion dollar corps I guess.
Same rules, but people are a lot less inclined to defend themselves because the cost of loss was seen as too high to even risk it.
Companies like this were allowed to siphon the free work of billions of people over centuries and they still want more.
Given OpenAI's history and relationship with the "AI safety" movement, I wouldn't be surprised to find out later that they also lobbied for the same proposed state-level regulations they're seeking relief from.
"Building a moat" frames anti-competitive behavior as a defense rather than an assault on the free market by implying that monopolistic behavior is a survival strategy rather than an attempt to dominate the market and coerce customers.
"We need to build a moat" is much more agreeable to tell employees than "we need to be more anti-competitive."
A moat by definition has such a large strategic asymmetry that one cannot cross it without a very high chance of death. A functioning SEC and FTC as well as CFPB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_... are necessary for efficient markets.
Now might be the time to rollout consumer club cards that are adversarial in nature.
* The secret formula for Coke
* ASML's technology
* The "Gucci" brand
* Apple's network effects
These are genuine competitive advantages in the market. Regulatory moats and other similar things are an assault on the free market. Moats in general are not.
I'm hardly the only one to think this way, hence regulation such as data portability in the EU.
The protocol example is a good one. However I don't think it's the network effect that's beneficial in that case but rather the innovation of the thing that was built.
If it's closed, I think that facet specifically is detrimental to the consumer.
If it's open, then that's the best you can do to mitigate the unfortunate reality that taking advantage of this particular innovation requires multiple participating endpoints. It's just how it is.
Moreover, they shouldn't have any way to force (or even nudge via defaults) the user to use Apple Payments, App Store, or other Apple platform pieces. Anyone should be on equal footing and there shouldn't be any taxation. Apple already has every single advantage, and what they're doing now is occupying an anticompetitive high ground via which they can control (along with duopoly partner Google) the entire field of mobile computing.
Apple's network effects are anti-compeitive creating vendor lock-in, which allows them to coerce customers. I generally defend Apple. But they are half anti-competitive (coerce customers), half competitive (earn customers), but earning customers is fueled by the coercive app store.
This is a very clear example of how moat is an abusive word. Under one framing (moat) network effects are a way to earn customers by spending resources on projects that earn customers (defending market position). In the anti-competitive framing, network effects are an explicit strategy to create vendor lock in and make it more challenging to migrate to other platforms so apple's budget to implement anti-customer policies is bigger.
ASML is a patent based monopoly, with exclusivity agreements with suppliers, with significant export controls. I will grant you that bleeding edge technology is arguably the best case argument for the word moat, but it's also worth asking in detail how technology is actually developed and understanding that patents are state sanctioned monopolies.
Both Apple and ASML could reasonably be considered monopo-like. So I'm not sure they are the best defense against how moat implies anti-competitive behavior. Monopolies are fundamentally anti-competitive.
The Gucci brand works against the secondary market for their goods and has an army of lawyers to protect their brand against imitators and has many limiting/exclusivity agreements on suppliers.
Coke's formula is probably the least "moaty" thing about coca cola. Their supply chain is their moat and their competitive advantage is also rooted in exclusivity deals. "Our company is so competitive because our recipe is just that good" is a major kool-aid take.
Patents are arguably good, but are legalized anti-competition. Exclusivity agreements don't seem very competitive. Acquisitions are anti-competitive. Pricing games to snuff out competition seems like the type of thing that can done chiefly in anti-competitive contexts.
So ASML isn't an argument against "moat means anti-competitive", but an argument that sometimes anti-competitive behavior is better for society because it allows for otherwise economically unfeasible things to be be feasible. The other brand's moats are much more rooted in business practices around acquisitions and suppliers creating de facto vertical integrations. Monopolies do offer better cheaper products, until they attain a market position that allows them to coerce customers.
Anti-trust authorities have looked at those companies.
Another conceptual metaphor is "president as CEO." The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous.
You could reasonably argue that the president functions as a CEO, but the metaphor itself is there to manufacture consent for unchecked power.
Conceptual metaphors are insidious. PR firms and think tanks actively work to craft these insidious metaphors that shape conversations and how people think about the world. By the time you've used the metaphor, you've already accepted many of the implications of the metaphor without even knowing it.
https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-from-do...
Also, the Gucci brand does not have lawyers. The Gucci brand is a name, a logo, and an aesthetic. Kering S.A. (owners of Gucci), enforces that counterfeit Gucci products don't show up. The designers at Kering spend a lot of effort coming up with Gucci-branded products, and they generally seem to have the pulse of a certain sector of the market.
The analysis of Coke's supply chain is wrong. The supply chain Coke uses is pretty run-of-the-mill, and I'm pretty sure that aside from the syrup (with the aforementioned secret formula), they actually outsource most of their manufacturing. They have good scale, but past ~100 million cans, I'm not sure you get many economies of scale in soda. That's why my local supermarket chain can offer "cola" that doesn't quite taste like Coke for cheaper than Coke. You could argue that the brand and the marketing are the moat, but the idea that Coke has a supply chain management advantage (let alone a moat over this) is laughable.
This is a drastic take, I think to most of us in the industry "moat" simply means whatever difficult-to-replicate competitive advantage that a firm has invested heavily in.
Regulatory capture and graft aren't moats, they're plain old corrupt business practices.
Worse that "moats" are a good thing, which they are for the company, but not necessarily society at large. The larger the moat, the more money coming out of your pocket as a customer.
It is insidious.
That's exactly what has been happening:
Ask HN: Why is OpenAI pushing for regulation so much - 2023
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36045397
If I want to use an LLM to augment my work, and don't have a massively powerful local machine to run local models, what are the best options?
Obviously I saw the news about OpenAI's head of research openly supporting war crimes, but I don't feel confident about what's up with the other companies.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/09/terrorists_...
Who’s chill? Groq is chill
E.g. i'm very outspoken about my preferences for open llm practices like executed by Meta and Deepseek. I'm very aware of the regulatory caption and pulling up the ladder tactics by the "AI safety" lobby.
However. In my own operations I do still rely on OpenAI because it works better than what I tried so far for my use case.
That said, when I can find an open model based SaaS operator that serves my needs as well without major change investment, I will switch.
For my "vibe coding" I've been using OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek if using small method generation, documentation shortcuts, library discovery and debugging counts as such.
You actually can't fault llama either, as a standalone product. However it's still in Zuck Paradise
Trump should have a Most Favored Corporate status, each corporation in a vertical can compete for favor and the one that does gets to be "teacher's pet" when it comes to exemptions, contracts, trade deals, priority in resource right access, etc.
I am not saying you’re wrong, but please educate me why is this form of corruption/cronyism is unique to fascism?
> An important aspect of fascist economies was economic dirigism,[35] meaning an economy where the government often subsidizes favorable companies and exerts strong directive influence over investment, as opposed to having a merely regulatory role. In general, fascist economies were based on private property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism
This can be bad without invoking godwin's law.
That does not imply that fish are snakes. Nor does the presence of scaled fish invalidate the observation that having scales is a defining attribute of snakes (it's just not a sufficient attribute to define snakes).
https://www.morphmarket.com/morphpedia/corn-snakes/scaleless...
That's a strange definition of "correlation" that you're using.
Here's a toy example. Imagine three equally sized groups of animals: scaly snakes, scaly fish, and scaleless fish. (So all snakes have scales, but not all scaly animals are snakes.) That's three data points (1,1) (0,1) (0,0) with probability 1/3 each. The correlation between snake and scaly comes out as 1/2.
You can also see it geometrically. The only way correlation can be 1 is if all points lie on a straight line. But in this case it's a triangle.
I am noting that the logical argument does not hold in the provided definition. If “some” attributes hold in a definition, you are expanding the definitional set, not reducing it, and thus creating a low-res definition. That is why I said: ‘this is a poor definition.’
The scary thing with fascism is just how quickly it can snowball because people at the top of so many powerful structures in society benefit. US Presidents get a positive spin by giving more access to organizations that support them. Those kinds of quiet back room deals benefit the people making them, but not everyone outside the room.
They then get access, get special treatment, and come out singing the praises of [errr.. what's his name again?]
Start looking and you’ll find powerful forces shaping history. Sacking a city is extremely profitable throughout antiquity, which then pushes cities to have defensive capabilities which then…
In the Bronze Age trade was critical as having Copper ore alone wasn’t nearly as useful as having copper and access to tin. Iron however is found basically everywhere as where trees.
Such forces don’t guarantee outcomes, but they have massive influence.
---
The term emerged in the post-World War II era to describe the economic policies of France which included substantial state-directed investment, the use of indicative economic planning to supplement the market mechanism and the establishment of state enterprises in strategic domestic sectors. It coincided with both the period of substantial economic and demographic growth, known as the Trente Glorieuses which followed the war, and the slowdown beginning with the 1973 oil crisis.
The term has subsequently been used to classify other economies that pursued similar policies, such as Canada, Japan, the East Asian tiger economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; and more recently the economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after its economic reforms,[2] Malaysia, Indonesia[3][4] and India before the opening of its economy in 1991.[5][6][7]
---
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme
It's a pretty normal word in British English, tbh.
Maybe it's because we do French at school.
All real world countries have some of this, but in fascism it’s really overt and dialed up and for the private sector participation is not optional. If you don’t toe the line you are ruined or worse. If you do play along you can get very very rich, but only if you remember who is in charge.
“Public private partnership” style ventures are kind of fascism lite, and they always worried me for that reason. It’s not an open bid but a more explicit relationship. If you look back at Musk’s career in particular there are ominous signs of where this was going.
This is pretty common fascist practice that is used all over Europe and in any left-leaning countries, when with regulations governments make doing business on large scale impossible, and then give largest players exemptions, subsidies and so on. Governments gain enormous leverage to ensure corporate loyalty, silence dissenters and combat opposition, while the biggest players secure their place at the top and gain protection from competitors.
So the plan was push regulations and then dominate over the competitors with exemptions from those regulations. But fascists loose the election, regulations threaten to start working in a non-discriminatory manner, and this will simply hinder business.
You mean like Germany has done?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_favoured_nation
Or his lackeys have anyway. I’m unwilling to believe the man has ever read a book.
Donald Trump, Jr. is in charge. Vivek Ramaswamy and Peter Thiel are involved. Azoria ETF and 1789 Capital are funds designed to fund MAGA-friendly companies.
But this may be a sideshow. The main show is US CEOs sucking up to Trump, as happened at the inauguration. That parallels something Putin did in 2020. Putin called in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them "Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched." "Loyalty is what Putin values above all else.” Three of the oligarchs didn't do that. Berezovsky was forced out of Russia. Gusinsky was arrested, and later fled the country. Khodorkovsky, regarded as Russia’s richest man at the time (Yukos Oil), was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in jail. He got out in 2013 and left for the UK. Interestingly, he was seen at Trump's inauguration.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/13/maga-influ...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-oligarchs-rich-ukrai...
> Khodorkovsky [...] was arrested in 2003
Something doesn't square here
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how...
If there’s anyone to copy it’s China in industry and maybe elements of Western Europe and Japan in some civic areas.
Russia is worse on every metric, even the ones conservatives claim to care about: lower birth rate, high divorce rate, much higher abortion rate, higher domestic violence rate, more drug use, more alcoholism, and much less church attendance.
I. Do. Not. Get. The Russia fetish.
It's not a Russia fetish. It's a Strongman fetish.
In the case of OpenAI, were I to guess, they'll likely do things like push for stronger copyright laws or laws against web scraping. Things that look harmless but ultimately will squash new competitors in the AI market. Now that they already have a bunch of the data to train their models, they'll be happy to make it a little harder for them to get new data if it means they don't have to compete.
It can be through keeping regulation to be mild or look the other way, but as often to put up high cost/high compliance burdens in place to pull up the drawbridge for new entrants.
Very doubtful: The current "AI" hype craze centers on LLMs, and they don't do math.
If anything they capabilities favor the other side, to obfuscate and protect falsehoods.
Unless they delete the Internet Archive of such info?
>>*and they don't do math.*
Have you ever considered the "Math of Politics"
Yeah - they do that just fine
((FYI -- Politics == Propaganda.. the first iteration of models is CHAT == Politics...
They do plenty of "Maths"))
The most-charitable paraphrase I can come up with it: "Bad people can't use LLMs to hide facts, hiding facts means removing source-materials. Math doesn't matter for politics which are mainly propaganda."
However even that just creates contradictions:
1. If math and logic are not important for uncovering wrongdoing, why was "tabulation" cited as an important feature in the first post?
2. If propaganda dominates other factors, why would the (continued) existence of the Internet Archive be meaningful? People will simply be given an explanation (or veneer of settled agreement) so that they never bother looking for source-material. (Or in the case of IA, copies of source material.)
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160112000701/http://www.timecu...
---
I am saying that AI can be used very beneficially to do a calculated dissection of the Truth of our Political structure as a Nation and how it truly impacts an Individual/Unit (person, family) -- and do so where we can get discernible metrics and utilize AIs understanding of the vast matrices of such inputs to provide meaningful outputs. Simple.
EDIT @MegaButts;
>>Why is this better than AI
People tend to think of AI in two disjointed categories; [AI THAT KNOWS EVERYTHING] v [AI THAT CAN EASILY SIFT THROUGH VAST EVERYTHING DATA GIVEN TO IT AND BE COMMANDED TO OUTPUT FINDINGS THAT A HUMAN COULDN'T DO ALONE]
---
Which do you think I refer to?
AI is transformative (pun intended) -- in that it allows for very complex questions to be asked of our very complex civilization in a simple and EveryMan hands...
Period.
If you dont understand the benefit of an AI augmenting the speed and depth of ingestion of Domain Context into a human mind.. then... go play with chalk.||I as a smart Human operate on lots of data... and AI and such has allowed me to consume such.
The most important medicines in the world are MEMORY retention...
It s youd like a conspiracy, eat too much aluminum to give you alzheimers asap so your generation forgets... (based though. hope you undestand what I am saying)
Not LLMs: They might reveal how people are popularly writing about the political structure of the nation.
If that were the same as "truth", we wouldn't need any kind of software analysis in the first place.
Truth: The real meaning behind the words which may or may not be interpreted by the receiver in A/B/N meaning
Truth: The actual structure of the nature of whats being presented.
When you can manipulate an individual's PERCEIVED reception of TRUTH between such, you can control reality... now do that at scale..
I'm not saying LLMs are useless, but I do not understand your use case.
A great example - people forget what life was like pre-Snowden. The authoritarians were out in locked ranks pretending that the US spies were tolerable - it made any sort of organisation to resist impossible. Then one day the parameters of the debate get changed and suddenly everyone is forced to agree that encryption everywhere is the only approach that makes sense.
And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.
Controlling demand for services is something that could stop this, but it’s technological progress, which could enable solutions for global warming, hunger, and disease.
It’s a locomotive out-of-control. Prayer is the answer I’d think of.
They don't care about that if they get a regulatory moat around them.
[1] https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/peo...
I predict Waymo will have their own struggles with profitability. Last I heard the LIDAR kit they put on cars costs more than the car. So they'll have to mass produce + maintain some fancy electronics on a million+ cars.
[0] https://languagesystems.edu/history-of-idioms-to-be-in-black...
OpenAI rejected a 97.4B USD buyout in February 2025 and won’t be absorbed anytime soon: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/technology/openai-elon-mu...
There's a reason they're sweating the data issue. As much as it sucks to say it, Google/Bing/Meta/etc. all have a shitton of proprietary human-generated data they can work with, train on, fine tune with, etc. OpenAI _needs_ more human generated data desperately to keep going.
No moat means Joe Anybody can compete with them. You just need billions in capital, a zillion GPUs, thousands of hyper skilled employees. You need to somehow get the attention of tens of millions of consumers (and then pull them away from the competition, ha).
Sure.
The same premise was endlessly floated about eg Uber and Google having no moats (Google was going to be killed by open search, Baidu, magic, whatever). These things are said by people that don't understand the comically vast cost of big infrastructure, branding, consumer lock-in (or consumer behavior in general), market momentum, the difficulty of raising enormous sums of capital, and so on.
Oh wait the skeptics say: what about DeepSeek. To scale and support that you're going to need what I described. What's the plan for supporting 100 million subscribers globally with a beast of an LLM that wants all the resources you can muster? Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh but wait, everyone is going to run a datacenter out of their home and operate their own local LLM, uhh nope. It's overwhelmingly staying in the cloud and it's going to cost far over a trillion dollars to power it globally over the next 20 years.
OpenAI has the same kind of moat that Google has, although their brand/reach/size obviously isn't on par at this point.
Microsoft has a mote. Oai does not.
OpenAI copilot, not microsoft copilot, actually looks like a stronger product and they're going full force after the enterprise market as we speak. We're setting a demo in motion with them next month to give it a go.
We'll have to wait for the first one to crack Powerpoint, that'll be the gamechanger.
Deepseek already proved regulation will not be effective at maintaining a market lead. =3
If you get fined millions of dollars (for copyright, of course) if you're found to have anything resembling DeepSeek on your machine - no company in the US is going to run it.
The personal market is going to be much smaller than the enterprise market.
Copyright licensing is just a detail corporations are well experienced dealing with in a commercial setting, and note some gov organizations are already exempt from copyright laws. However, people likely just won't host in countries with silly policies.
Best regards =3
Note: Data centers often naturally colocate with cold-climates, low-cost energy generation facilities, and fiber optic distance to major backbones/hubs.
At a certain scale, Energy cost is more important than location and hardware. The US just broke its own horses leg with tariffs before the race. Not bullish on the US domestic tech firms these days, and sympathize with the good folks at AMCHAM that will ultimately be left to clean up the mess eventually.
If businesses have opportunity to cut their operational variable costs >25%, than one can be fairly certain these facilities won't be located on US soil.
Have a great day =3
Is there opportunity? Lower risks and energy prices may well outweigh the cost of tariffs. It is not like any other horse in the race has perfectly healthy legs.
Depends on the posture, as higher profit businesses may invest more into maintaining market dominance. However, the assumption technology is a zero-sum economic game was dangerously foolish, and attempting to cheat the global free market is ultimately futile.
Have a wonderful day, =3
That would be as successful as fighting internet piracy.
Not to mention that you could outsource the AI stuff to servers sitting in Mexico or something.
If what the admin is doing is illegal, then a court stops it, and they appeal and win, then it wasn't illegal. If they appeal all the way up and lose, then they can't do it.
So what exactly is the problem?
Mind you, I am asking for nits, this isn't my idea. I don't think "the administration will ignore the supreme court" is a good nit.
And you have people arguing that on the one hand the executive has had too much leeway to regulate, but then in the same breath saying that the executive now needs to unilaterally ignore the orders of past congresses in order to fix whatever perceived problems have led us here. Which is a kind of irony that makes me think that this is being done not to solve problems but to reshape our government for some other end. And all of this is compounded by the legislature's unwillingness to exercise the exact power that they have been granted, which is to change the law of the United States.
So in this situation it's hard to see the courts siding with these people as simply rationally applying the law, because the law itself as written by past legislatures is simply being ignored, as are past judicial precedents, because they are inconvenient to the goal of dismantling the US government. It's also extremely dangerous because the "full faith and credit" of the United States depends on us honoring our commitments even when they are inconvenient to us.
US tech, and western tech in general, is very culturally - and by this I mean in the type of coding people have done - homogeneous.
The deep seek papers published over the last two weeks are the biggest thing to happen in IA since GPT3 came out. But unless you understand distributed file systems, networking, low level linear algebra, and half a dozen other fields at least tangentially then you'd have not realized they are anything important at all.
Meanwhile I'm going through the interview process for a tier 1 US AI lab and I'm having to take a test about circles and squares, then write a compsci 101 red/black tree search algorithm while talking to an AI, being told not to use AI at the same time. This is with an internal reference being keen for me to be on board. At this point I'm honestly wondering if they aren't just using the interview process to generate high quality validation data for free.
幸运的是，通过转换器模型，当我们光荣的领导人习近平从资本主义走狗手中解放我们时，我不需要学习中文。
Funny how they like to crow about free markets, while also running to daddy government when their position is threatened.
In the US right now you can have a death match between every AI lab, then give all the resources to the one which wins and you'd still have largely the same results as if you didn't.
The reason why Deepseek - it started life as a HFT firm - hit as hard as it did is because it was a cross disciplinary team that had very non-standard skill sets.
I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA engineers away from HFT firms and it was basically impossible. They already make big tech (or higher) salaries without the big tech bullshit - which none of them would ever pass.
Can confirm. There are downsides, and it can get incredibly stressed at times, but there are all sorts of big tech imposed hoops you don't have to jump through.
Could you kindly share some examples for those of us without big tech experience? I assume you're talking about working practises more than just annoying hiring practises like leetcode?
Not sure if that is accurate, but one of the reasons why DeepSeek R1 performs so well in certain areas is thought to be access to China's Gaokao (university entrance exam) data.
Its a niche product that tried to go mainstream and the general public doesn't want it, just look at iPhone 16 sales and Windows 11, everyone is happier with the last version without AI.
embrace. extend. extinguish.
infiltrate. assimilate.
done, tovarisch ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tovarishch
The article seems to indicate they want all AI companies to get relief from these laws though.
All the profit and none of the liability is Coward Capitalism.
also what liability do you expect them to assume? they want to offer models while saying "to use these, you must agree we don't have liability for their outputs." if companies want to use these models but don't want to deal with liability themselves, so they demand the government shift the liability to the model vendor (despite the conditions the vendor applied), that sounds like coward capitalism to me. don't like it? don't use their models.
Citation needed, or at least some reasoning. The answer to "is this fair use" can't be "it's fair use because it's fair use"
> also what liability do you expect them to assume
The same liability anybody does for distributing copyright works without a license? Why are they not liable if it turns out the stuff they've been distributing and making people pay for was content they didn't own the license to distribute?
While I agree with you in principle, there's little that can be done because the current crop of crony capitalists will likely support the idea of no liability for tech companies. Especially when it comes to ripping off copyrighted material. Everything from blog posts, to videos, to music, to any source code you post on the internet will be used to train models to be better writers, artists, musicians, and programmers.
I feel like the only option left is to find some way to make money on the output of the models. Because the politicians are definitely going to allow the models to make money based on your output.
Yes it is a fact they did build themselves up on top of mountains of copyrighted material, and that AI has a lot of potential to do harm, but if they are forced to stop or slow down foreign actors will just push forward and innovate without guardrails and we will just fall behind as the rest of the world pushes forward.
Its easy to see how foreign tech is quickly gaining ground. If they truly cared about still propping America up, they should allow some guardrails to be pushed past.
What evidence led you to that conclusion?
For instance, a company may not desire to hand out cash to win business; previously, when solicited they could say, "Sorry, it is illegal for me to do so." Now there is no such shield.
Second, in many cases it will be two or more US businesses trying to win business in some other country, and the change of the law only makes it more expensive for those two companies, as they now must play a game of bribery chicken to win the business.
Third, the US loves to claim it is is a democracy and is working to spread democracy. By legitimizing bribes paid to foreign officials over the interests of their voting populace, we are undermining democracy in those countries (not that anyone who pays attention believes that the US's foreign policy is anything but self interested and divorced from spreading democratic ideals).
Is the US not lowering it's capacity to innovate and grow it's economy by preventing the use of forced labour(even in other countries)? Why should these "guardrails" stay in place if the argument is "the reality is they are right that guardrails only serve to hurt us in the long run, at least at this pivotal point in time"?
States have the power to make it prohibitively expensive to operate in those states, leaving people to either go to VPNs or use AI's hosted in other countries where they don't care if they're not following whatever new AI law California decides to pass. And companies would choose just to use datacenters not in the prohibitive states and ban ips from those states.
Course if a company hosts in us-east-1, and allows access from California, would the inter state commerce clause not take effect and California would have no power anyways?
California can't legislate how they serve a customer in a different state. They would have to comply when serving California customers within the state of California, regardless of where the dc is located. I.E. Under the CCPA it doesn't matter where my data is stored, they still have to delete it upon my request.
I know this is what California thinks, I just personally don't see how this isn't inter state commerce.
If states couldn't regulate interstate commerce taking place in their own states, they effectively couldn't regulate any commerce because court decisions have found that essentially all economic activity, even growing food for your own consumption, falls under the banner of interstate commerce.
Hey I know this one! In case anyone is interested, here's the case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Granted the "regulation" I'm referring to above is a law or EO to block California's regulation, and I don't support California's regulation either. But I believe regulations should only exist when there's no better alternative, because they usually have unintended consequences. If it's true that OpenAI can basically just leave California, the better alternative for the government may be doing nothing.
.. which is the prevailing situation for people dealing with state-by-state age verification at the moment.
In fact most of the proposal sounds like it could have been written by the US government. Exporting democratic AI, neutralize PRC benefit of American AI, etc.
How about the AI providers? they operate on thin margins, and make just cents a million tokens. If one provider is too expensive, users quickly switch.
Maybe the users? Users derive the lion share of benefits from AI. But those benefits are hard to quantize.
Maybe a blanket tax? That would simplify things, but would put all creatives on a quantitative rather than qualitative criteria.
I think generative AI is the worst copyright infringement tool ever devised. It's slow, expensive and imprecise. On the other hand copying is fast, free and perfect. I think nobody can, for science, regurgitate a full book with AI, it won't have fidelity to the original.
The real enemy of any artist is the long tail of works, sometimes spanning decades, that they have to compete against. So it's other authors. That is why we are in an attention economy, and have seen the internet enshittified.
The most creative part of internet ignores copyright royalties. From open source, to wikipedia, open scientific publication and even social networks, if everyone demanded royalties none of them would be possible.
Notably, in all of these cases the people involved consent to participating.
Had to check this wasn’t sama.
You seriously believe the real enemy of artists is other artists? Not the guys making billions and trying to convince us “the computers are just reading it like a human”?
it was living cells, but they worked as transistors, would it be ok?
it was whole-brain emulation on silicon transistors, would it be ok?
it was a generative AI similar to what we have today, but 100x more sentient and self aware, is that ok?
if you locked a human in a room with nothing but tolkien books for 20 years, then asked them to write a fantasy novel, is that ok?
All art is built on learning from previous art. I don't understand the logic of it being a computer so suddenly now it's wrong and bad. I also don't understand general support of intellectual property when it overwhelmingly benefits the mega wealthy and stifles creative endeavors like nothing else. You art isn't less valuable just because a computer makes something similar, in the same way it's not less valuable if another human copies your style and makes new art in your style.
My answer to this is one I've written already before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42720749
It's going to be a threat to my career, soon enough — but the threat it poses to me exists even if it never read any of my blog posts or my github repos. Even if it had never read a single line of ObjC or Swift.
> Do we need to spell out that these systems aren't human artists simply looking at paintings and admiring features about them?
In a word, yes.
In more words: explain what it would take for an AI to count as a person — none of what you wrote connects with what was in the comment you replied to.
You dismiss AI as "python": would it help if the maths was done as the pure linear amplification range of the quantum effects in transistors?; you dismiss them as "sucking in pixels from anywhere they can find them" like humans don't spend all day with their eyes open; you complain "corporations with billion dollar valuations to increase investor/shareholder value at the expense of the people who provided the artwork to train the systems" like this isn't exactly what happens with government funded education of humans.
I anticipate that within my lifetime it will be possible for a human brain to be preserved on death, scanned, and the result used as a full brain sim that remembers what the human remembered at the the time of death. Would it matter if the original human had memorised Harry Potter end-to-end and the upload could quote it all perfectly? Would Rowling get the right to delete that brain upload?
I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing mouse neurons on electrode grids to train them to play video games. It's entirely plausible, given the current rate of progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be encoded onto a brain organoid the size of a living mouse's brain — does it magically become OK then? And in 30 years, that same thing as an implant into a human?
The threat to my economic prospects is already present in completely free models whose weights are given away and cannot avail the billion-dollar corporations who made them. I can download free models and run them on my laptop, outputting tokens faster than I can read them for an energy budget lower than my own brain, corporations who made those models don't profit directly by me doing this, and if those corporations go bankrupt I can still run those models.
The risk to my economic value is not because any of these "stole" anything, but because the models are useful and cheap.
GenAI art (and voice) is… well, despite the fact I will admit to enjoying it privately/on free content, whenever I see it on products or blog posts, or when I hear it in the voices on YouTube videos, it's a sign the human behind it has zero budget and therefore whatever it is I don't want to buy it. People already use it because it's cheap, it's a sign of being cheap, signs of cheap are a proxy of generally poor quality.
But that's not going to save my career, nobody's going to decide to boycott all iPhone apps that aren't certified "made by 100% organic grass-fed natural humans with no AI assistance".
So believe me, I get that it's scary. But the arguments you're using aren't good ones.
No one said "it's scary".
No one is "dismissing them".
It seems like you're arguing against some other person you've made up in your mind. I use these systems every single day, but if you don't understand the argument about consent and the extremely obvious difference between Python programs and humans that I already pointed out, then no one can help you. I'll keep making these arguments, because they are good ones, and they are obvious to any human being who isn't stuck in tech-bro fairy land blabbering about how human consciousness is completely identical to Python linear algebra libraries when any 6 year old child knows with certainty they are not.
> In a word, yes.
This is, frankly, embarrassing.
Your own words suggest this. Many others are more explicit. There are calls for models to be forcibly deleted. Your own statements here about lack of consent are still in this vein.
> No one said "it's scary".
Many, including me, find it so.
> No one is "dismissing them".
You, specifically you, are — "feeling or showing that something is unworthy of consideration".
> if you don't understand the argument about consent and the extremely obvious difference between Python programs and humans that I already pointed out, then no one can help you.
Consent is absolutely an argument I get. It's specifically where I'm agreeing with you.
The other half of that…
Python, like all programming languages, is universal. Python programs can implement physics, so trying to use the argument "because it's implemented on silicon rather than chemistry" is a distinction without a difference.
Quantum mechanics is linear algebra.
> I'll keep making these arguments, because they are good ones, and they are obvious to any human being who isn't stuck in tech-bro fairy land blabbering about how human consciousness is completely identical to Python linear algebra libraries when any 6 year old child knows with certainty they are not.
(An example of you "dismissing" AI).
Then you'll keep being confused and enraged about why people disagree with you.
And not just because you have a wildly wrong understanding of what 6 year olds think about. I remember being 6, all the silly things I believed back then. What my classmates believed falsely. How far most of us were from understanding what algebra was, let alone distinguishing linear algebra from other kinds.
I've got a philosophy A-level, which is enough to know that "consciousness" is a completely unsolved question and absolutely nobody agrees what the minimum requirements are for it. 40 different definitions, we don't even all agree what the question is yet, much less then answer.
But I infer from you bring it up, that you think "consciousness" is an important thing that AI is missing?
Well perhaps it is something current AI miss, something their architecture hasn't got — when we can't agree what the question is, any answer is possible. We evolved it, but just because it can pop up for no good reason doesn't mean it must be present everywhere. (I say much the same to people who are convinced AI must have it: we don't know). So, what if machines are not conscious? Why does that matter?
And you've not answered one of my examples. To repeat:
I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing mouse neurons on electrode grids to train them to play video games. It's entirely plausible, given the current rate of progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be encoded onto a brain organoid the size of a living mouse's brain — does it magically become OK then? And in 30 years, that same thing as an implant into a human?
I don't think that is meaningfully distinct, morally speaking, from doing this in silicon. Making the information alive and in my own brain makes it not python, but all the consent issues remain.
This whole mess is because society decided that restricting everyone's rights to share and access information was a sane tradeoff to make for making sure people got paid. No it is not and, so long as humans are physical, it will never be. It appears that humanity will have to get this simple fact hammered into them with every new leap in technology.
Find another work-rewarding scheme. Ensure you get paid before you release information (e.g. crowd funding or contracts with escrows). Forget about nonsensical concepts relating to "intellectual" property (information is not property). Forget recurring revenue from licensing information. You only get paid once when you do work. You are not entitled to anything more. If reality makes living off your work unworkable, do something else.
I'm glad other countries are starting to wake up and ignore this nonsense. Stop trying make something as unnatural and immoral as this work.
That sounds like corruption
It's the New York Times and various journalist and writers' unions that are leading the charge against American AI.
American journalists and opinion piece writers want to kill American AI and let China and Russia have the global lead. Why? Have they taught about the long consequences of what they are doing?
I think you're framing it in a way that makes it seem like they don't want to be compensated for working, they just want to stop other people from starting a new industry, which doesn't seem like a good faith understanding of the situation.
Everytime an answer is drawn from "certain learned weights," make it so that the source of that knowledge is paid cents per volume.
Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you could game the training. Like have as much of the process happen via public domain sources or pay-once licenses. That would cover a lot of the fundamental knowledge and processes. Then you could fine-tune on copyrighted data. That might actually make it easier to see how much influence on the final weights that content has, but is also would probably be a lot less influence. There's a big difference between a painting of an apple being the main contribution to the concept of "apple" in an image model, vs mention of that painting corresponding to a few weights that just reference a bunch of other concepts that were learned via open data.
Well, Bing AI already knows where it drew the information from and cites sources; so it would be a matter of making the deal.
How to enforce it? that's the main question I reckon.
> Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you could game the training. Like have as much of the process happen via public domain sources or pay-once licenses.
I agree.
It would be easier to negotiate a fixed cost on using a particular datum per training of a model.
The first arrangement is very clearly a labor arrangement; but the second one is a deliberate attempt to force artists to act like capitalists. More importantly, because art is now acting like capital, it provides an obvious economic instinct to centralize[0]. So you get industrialized artistic production under the banner of publishing companies, whose business model is to buy out the copyright to new creative works and then exploit them.
What AI art does is transfer money from the labor side of art to the capital side of art. The MAFIAA[1] wants AI art to exist because it means they can stop paying artists but still make royalties off selling licenses to the AI companies. This increases their profit margins. Meanwhile, the journalists can't sell you old news; they need to spend lots of time and money gathering it every day. That business model only works in a world where writers are scarce, not just the writing itself being artificially scarce.
[0] We can see this with cryptocurrency, which is laughably centralized despite being a deliberate attempt to decentralize money.
[1] Music and Film Industry Association of America, a hypothetical merger of the RIAA and MPAA from a satirical news article
Is it interesting? They hate the people who produce their product and are desperate to replace them with machines. Note that their unions also hate AI, and it was a central reason for for the Writer's Guild SAG-AFTRA strike, since you're bringing up the NYT unions.
The NYT also stands to benefit not an iota from AI. It probably causes a burden because they have to make sure that their awful long-in-the-tooth editorial columnists aren't turning in LLM slop. It is entirely a negative for people who generate high quality content the hard way.
How can this ever be acceptable?
Because the only people capable of holding him accountable won't do it.
The system is broken. The US Government/Constitution depends too much on the assumption that people will do the right thing.
I don't recall Biden reading off a price sheet for a single corporation. Seems a bit different than what happened yesterday the White House.
I think you're inventing new norms. It has never been unusual or interesting for the president of a country to do PR for some company in their country that has hit a rough patch (as long as this isn't a legal rough patch.)
Most of what our diplomats do is sell US products to other countries. They certainly have always played favorites.
> How can this ever be acceptable?
The horror. What if he says that he's going to Burger King?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-president-...
People might think this is a partisan statement, but it's not. It's simply how he is operating. Want power? Want to get things done? Kiss his feet. You saw all the tech boys line up at his inauguration. You saw him tell Zelenskyy "Thank me". Elon might have power, but he is also on a leash.
Trump did this during his previous term as well, with Ivanka and Jared Kushner, but to a much less significant degree.
OpenAI training on every content creator's outputs is ... good.
This started in 2023 when LLaMA 1 was released, and has been going strong ever since. How strong? there are 330K datasets on HuggingFace, many of them generated from OpenAI.