The OpenAI that is assumed to keep being able to harvest every form of IP without compensation is valued at $150B, an OpenAI that has to pay for data would be worth significantly less. They're currently not even expecting to turn a profit until 2029, and that's without paying for data.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-reveals-openais-44-bil...

OpenAI is not profitable, and to achieve what they have achieved they had to scrape basically the entire internet. I don't have a hard time believing that OpenAI could not exist if they had to respect copyright.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...

That's not real money tough. You need actual cash on hand to pay for stuff, OpenAI only have the money they've been given by investors. I suspect that many of the investors wouldn't have been so keen if they knew that OpenAI would need an additional couple of billions a year to pay for data.

That doesn’t mean they have $150B to hand over. What you can cite is the $10 billion they got from Microsoft.

I’m sure they could use a chunk of that to buy competitive I.P. for both companies to use for training. They can also pay experts to create it. They could even sell that to others for use in smaller models to finance creating or buying even more I.P. for their models.

Copyright is a dead man walking and that's a good thing. Let's applaud the end of a temporary unnatural state of affairs.

It's hysterical to compare training an ML model with slave labour. It's perfectly fine and accepted for a human to read and learn from content online without paying anything to the author when that content has been made available online for free, it's absurd to assert that it somehow becomes a human rights violation when the learning is done by a non-biological brain instead.

Lots of people create without getting paid to do it. A lot of music and art is unprofitable. In fact, you could argue that when the mainstream media companies got completely captured by suits with no interest in the things their companies invested in, that was when creativity died and we got consigned to genre-box superhero pop hell.

I don’t know. When I look at news from before, there never was investigative journalism. It was all opinion swaying editos, until alternate voices voiced their counternarratives. It’s just not in newspapers because they are too politically biased to produce the two sides of stories that we’ve always asked them to do. It’s on other media.

But investigative journalism has not disappeared. If anything, it has grown.

> they're just straight-up breaking the law and getting away with it.

So far this has not been determined and there's plenty of reasonable arguments that they are not breaking copyright law.

Exactly. They rushed to violate copyright on a massive scale quickly, and now are making the argument that it shouldn't apply to them and they couldn't possibly operate in compliance with it. As long as humans don't get to ignore copyright, AI shouldn't either.

Easy to turn one into the other, just get someone to leak the model weights.

Am I jazzed about Sam Altman making billions? No.

Am I even more concerned about the state having control over the future corpus of knowledge via this doomed-in-any-case vector of "intellectual property"? Yes.

I think it will be easier to overcome the influence of billionaires when we drop the pretext that the state is a more primal force than the internet.