Comment by executesorder66

Nah. It would just lead to more of classical search. Which is okay, as it always has been.

LLMs are not retrieval engines, and thinking them as such is missing most of their value. LLMs are understanding engines. Much like for humans, evaluating and incorporating knowledge is necessary to build understanding - however, perfect recall is not.

Another, arguably equivalent way of framing it: the job of an LLM isn't to provide you with the facts; it's main job is to understand what you mean. The "WIM" in "DWIM". Making it do that does require stupid amounts of data and tons of compute in training. Currently, there's no better way, and the only alternative system with similar capabilities are... humans.

IOW, it's not even an apples to oranges comparison, it's apples to gourmet chef.

>The same data that average American housewives were sued over for millions of dollars of "damages"? The same data that often gets random German plumbers or steelworkers to pay thousands of euros of "fines" to the copyright mafia so they won't get sued and have their lives ruined?

Honestly curious. Could you share any examples of these cases?

Is there also a famous Russian phrase that translates to "details are irrelevant, it kinda looks similar to me therefore it's the same"? If not, there definitely should be.

The details are the entire point. Arguing that a corporation can get away doing something, while an individual can't, isn't useful, because there are great many of such somethings, and in most cases it turns out perfectly reasonable, once you dig into details.

> The very same data poor American students were forced to commit suicide over

Leaving the rest of your argument aside, precisely nobody forced aaronsw to commit suicide.

There are those who are in charge and those who aren't.

That's not Uber's Gambit.

Uber was blatantly ignoring the local laws in order to break into the market and quickly defeat local competition. They used their infinite VC money supply to interfere with and delay investigations and enforcement, betting that if they do it fast enough, they'll have the general population on their side.

LLM vendors found and exploited[0] a legal uncertainty - correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK it still isn't settled whether or not their actions were actually illegal. Unlike Uber, LLM vendors aren't breaking into markets by ignoring the laws to outcompete incumbents, and burning stupid amounts of money just to get away with it. On the contrary, LLM vendors are simply providing an actually useful product, and charging a reasonable price for it, while reinvesting it into improving the product. Effects it has on other markets aside[1], their business model is just providing actual value in exchange for money. That's much more direct and honest than most of the tech industry.

The product itself is also different. Uber is selling a mirage, a "miracle" improvement that quickly turns not so, and is destined to eventually destroy the markets it disrupted. LLM vendors are developing and serving systems that provide actual value to users, directly and obviously so.

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[0] - Probably walked into this without initially realizing it. No one complained 5-10 years ago, where the datasets were smaller and the resulting models had no real-world utility. It's only when the models became useful, that some people started looking for ways to make them go away.

[1] - That's an unfortunate effect of it being a general AI tool, and would be the same regardless of how it was created.

I can, but I don't, because that's at best an unintended side effect.

In progress. Nobody is expecting the original protections afforded by copyright to apply here, but the fact that the material is pirated is less relevant than whether or not an LLM is a transformative use of the material.

We will almost certainly see copyright law weakened by the case, but I do not believe that FB will get off with no penalties.