Comment by walrus01

Yes, I think the Gates quote was a response to repeated and aggressive complaints originating from Jobs (to anyone who would listen) that he had been ripped off.

I don't know if that's a real quote from Gates, but I do know it was in Pirates of Silicon Valley.

I thought Xerox demoed something they haven’t implemented yet, and Apple turned a mockup into a real GUI.

I'm very pro distillation. I think there needs to be distillation non profits who curate massive corpi of super high value training data from frontier models. They could have an "anonymous contribution" system where regular people with max subscriptions upload their conversation histories. It's a rough concept, but surely would be a huge boon to humanity.

Glad you pointed this out. I believe the sequence was that Jobs himself got a shorter demo during his first visit with no prior arrangements. He then negotiated bringing back a group of his key people to get a more in depth demo and that included the stock deal.

When Apple was accused of 'ripping off' PARC, Steve didn't seem keen to bring up this rather salient point. I suspect it may have been a combination of wanting Apple to continue receiving credit for these innovations from consumers and also the fact that, in retrospect, the million dollar stock deal could seem a bit like trading beads to Native Americans for Manhattan Island. Another point worth noting is that Apple's PARC visit was in December 1979 and the Xerox Star was publicly announced in April 1981, so Apple got a 15 month head start (the Apple Lisa shipped in Jan 83).

I've also heard that Xerox didn't hold on to the Apple stock for very long, so never gained the windfall they could have. As is well documented, Xerox senior management didn't understand what they had in PARC and also didn't understand how rapidly microcomputers would become ubiquitous. So, of course, they didn't think Apple's stock price would skyrocket either.

Perhaps an arrangement can be reached?

The websites, music, movies, books, photos, art that they stole didn't appear out of thin air. The amount of time and effort people have collectively poured into creating these works throughout history far, far surpasses Anthropic's own effort of converting them into model weights.

The equivocation is crawling website <-> crawling LLM responses.

Both Anthropic and Alibaba are trying to build bleeding edge LLMs. That part is the same. The way they source their data is slightly different, but they would both argue it constitutes fair use under Copyright law.

"Your extremely efficient multi petabyte internet content suction machine is ripping off my extremely efficient multi petabyte internet content suction machine"

Sucking down petabytes of peoples' copyrighted content that they never granted a specific license to you to use seems to be an unavoidable and default part of the process of building any huge LLM.

It's not really equivocation in this instance. This feels like a 'bad faith' comment. We can do better.

LLM's literally wouldn't work without the sum total of knowledge (in the forms of books and other copyrighted content) being used as 'training data' for these LLMs.

The 'bleeding edge' LLMs required many things, but: 1 Tech innovation ('attention') 2 Lots of compute 3 Data 4 Pre + post training

#4 doesn't happen without #3.

It's pretty obvious at this point that the major providers have stolen vast amounts of #3 - they have paid nearly 0 of the creators.

We can argue about the impact (I'd lean net good) vs. the cost. But arguing there isn't a cost is a bit silly.