Technology

So banks will be public domain when they're bailed out with taxpayer funds, too, right?

"Given they were trained on our data, it makes sense that it should be public commons – that way we all benefit from the processing of our data"

I wonder how many people besides the author of this article are upset solely about the profit-from-copyright-infringement aspect of automated plagiarism and bullshit generation, and thus would be satisfied by the models being made more widely available.

The inherent plagiarism aspect of LLMs seems far more offensive to me than the copyright infringement, but both of those problems pale in comparison to the effects on humanity of masses of people relying on bullshit generators with outputs that are convincingly-plausible-yet-totally-wrong (and/or subtly wrong) far more often than anyone notices.

I liked the author's earlier very-unlikely-to-be-met-demand activism last year better:

I just sent @OpenAI a cease and desist demanding they delete their GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 models in their entirety and remove all of my personal data from their training data sets before re-training in order to prevent #ChatGPT telling people I am dead.

...which at least yielded the amusingly misleading headline OpenAI ordered to delete ChatGPT over false death claims (it's technically true - a court didn't order it, but a guy who goes by the name "That One Privacy Guy" while blogging on linkedin did).

It won't really do anything though. The model itself is whatever. The training tools, data and resulting generations of weights are where the meat is. Unless you can prove they are using unlicensed data from those three pieces, open sourcing it is kind of moot.

What we need is legislation to stop it from happening in perpetuity. Maybe just ONE civil case win to make them think twice about training on unlicensed data, but they'll drag that out for years until people go broke fighting, or stop giving a shit.

They pulled a very public and out in the open data heist and got away with it. Stopping it from continuously happening is the only way to win here.

To speak of AI models being "made public domain" is to presuppose that the AI models in question are covered by some branch of intellectual property. Has it been established whether AI models (even those trained on properly licensed content) even are covered by some branch of intellectual property in any particular jurisdiction(s)? Or maybe by "public domain" the author means that they should be required to publish the weights and also that they shouldn't get any trade secret protections related to those weights?

Nice one

Imaginary property has always been a tricky concept, but the law always ends up just protecting the large corporations at the expense of the people who actually create things. I assume the end result here will be large corporations getting royalties from AI model usage or measures put in place to prevent generating content infringing on their imaginary properties and everyone else can get fucked.

It could also contain non-public domain data, and you can't declare someone else's intellectual property as public domain just like that, otherwise a malicious actor could just train a model with a bunch of misappropriated data, get caught (intentionally or not) and then force all that data into public domain.

Laws are never simple.

Correct

The environmental cost of training is a bit of a meme. The details are spread around, but basically, Alibaba trained a GPT-4 level-ish model on a relatively small number of GPUs... probably on par with a steel mill running for a long time, a comparative drop in the bucket compared to industrial processes. OpenAI is extremely inefficient, probably because they don't have much pressure to optimize GPU usage.

Inference cost is more of a concern with crazy stuff like o3, but this could dramatically change if (hopefully when) bitnet models come to frutition.

Still, I 100% agree with this. Closed LLM weights should be public domain, as many good models already are.

Delete them. Wipe their databases. Make the companies start from scratch with new, ethically acquired training data.