Comment by ben_w

> What if you could just licence the code to Anthropic, OpenAI or any other AI lab and make passive income every time its sold.

If you want a fancy licence to all my old code to use for whatever, we can talk, but fat lot of good some 15 year old ObjC and Java will do you for finding the other side of a sale. My total revenue for the stock photos I tried licensing back when it was the early days of pro-am photography and we all thought there might be some passive income opportunities for stuff like this, was exactly zero.

According to recent legal cases, the current status seems to be there's no problem training on something so long as you had legal access to that material in the first place, so nobody would want to pay for this. But even if those rules change and they need to licence my code (and other text) to train on it, a lot of LLM's abilities come not from code but from understanding what language means, so the mean human's contribution to these models is necessarily parts per multi-billion, and that includes if we get paid for all the stuff we do while at work and not just on our own time; therefore, even if I got 100% of the revenue, my lifetime's code output might be worth perhaps $50/year even if you train on all the code from all the companies I no longer work for.