Comment by protimewaster
17 hours ago
The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, except their stuff. It's okay to hammer some random website with AI crawlers, ignoring robots.txt, and causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
Anthropic, Dario especially seems have eternal grudge against China as a concept, that remind me of Thiel.
Coming from him, I am not sure even that is real. It could very easily (and plausibly) be a part of the ongoing hype drama.
"Our models so precious, US Gov has to revoke access to foreigner." - tuned up version: "Our models so advanced our #1 adversary is desperately stealing it from us."
All a facade no? It's just about regulatory capture.
I dont think so, Altman seems more likely to play regulatory capture here, but Dario seems having pure and personal hatred.
Just overly hubristic
He has an eternal grudge against anyone filling up his moat.
That's one aspect, which is a bit of a gray zone. But Anthropic trained on pirated books. That is explicitly illegal.
That ship has sailed, I would wager all the AI labs are ingesting anything human generated, whether that means Hollywood movies, Taylor Swift’s discography, YouTube videos or private GitHub source repos.
The reward for having a competitive edge is exponentially higher than the risk of a lawsuit. Politicians are still old bureaucrats who don’t understand technology.
so did Meta for Llama.
The entire chat thread and email exchange was exposed in Discovery; apparently Zuck signed off on it. In one of the IM exchanges one of them say ‘everyone is doing it’
https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1879152507865485497?s=20
As I understand it what was "explicitly illegal" was copying the books, in the sense of mere copying before feeding them to the model, and this is what the Anthropic copyright settlement is about.
Actually processing them through the model, though, was considered transformative and therefore fair use.
They didn't train on the books and that court only found that the pirating was illegal anyway.
I'd love to see an open-source project that's basically a Torrent client for downloading pirated material, but it trains an AI model "in the background" using the downloaded content. That way everyone can claim fair use for possessing copyrighted material, I mean there's precedent right?
I am not a lawyer, from what I understand that the precedent is that you can use copyrighted material in ML process. Even though meta has, allegedly, pirated the material, the cost of violation would be pennies compared to the ai spend, since that is the violation, not that they used those materials,
They were liable for copying the books in the first place, regardless of whether or not they trained the AI with them. Read the opinion.
>The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free,
The AI companies? That's been the common ethos of the internet for 40 years
I mean, raise your hand if you ad block and have a hard drive of pirated content...
> But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
It's the same question libertarian advocates cannot resolve:
It is also not a coincidence that leadership in many tech companies have expressed libertarian ideals.
What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them? Because they definitely have answers to this question...
I think the typical answer is “free market” but that answer doesn’t sway because:
1. Nobody bothers to explain why something could function as a free market and
2. Nobody bothers to resolve the plethora of domains that de-facto cannot operate as free markets.
So, in that sense, they don’t have answers. “Look over there!” is not an answer.
Free markets are actually not a given. We have to build them and build in systems so that they can operate as free markets. How that intersects with healthcare, public utilities, etc is complicated. IME libertarians are reductionist and simple, which is why many people have just taken the route of ignoring their arguments.
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> What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them?
The latter I suppose.
I qualify my answer because what few rational responses I have seen to this question are equivocations at best and thinly veiled myopic sophistry supporting personal greed in general.
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Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem? Neither system resolves both problems.
Extremist dogma is not a great way to run a society, but it does good numbers on social media, so here we are.
Only one is a reasonable problem in functioning societies, the other one mostly a fallacy.
Democratic socialists and social democrats solve the free rider problem through general taxation and regulation.
Consider universal healthcare as the case in point for this; we absorb the cost of chronically ill people by mixing them in with the rest of the population, at a fraction of the price that the "free market" costs to attempt and fail to do the same thing.
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> Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem?
This is a fallacy (tu quoque/whataboutism). You're changing the subject to distract from the fundamental problem in libertarianism and implying that some other strawman is just as bad.
Without solving the fundamental problem, libertarianism will never work for anything but toy societies.
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