im pretty sure this is in violation of moonshot's ToS. this is going to be fun to watch unfold

At the same time, Moonshot violated Anthropic's ToS by training on their models' outputs :) [0]. And Anthropic violated copyright law by training on copyrighted material. It's violations all the way down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126614

	▲	_aavaa_ 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I thought Anthopoc’s training was deemed fair used. It was the downloading that was illegal

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NitpickLawyer 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is no ToS at play here. There's only the license[1], which is MIT modified like so:

> Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you shall prominently display "Kimi K2.5" on the user interface of such product or service.

[1] - https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5/blob/main/LICENS...

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zozbot234 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, this is pretty clear-cut. There's even a great alternative, namely GLM-5, that does not have such a clause (and other alternatives besides) so it feels a bit problematic that they would use Kimi 2.5 and then disregard that advertisement clause.

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NitpickLawyer 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I've replied down the thread, but there are ways to go around that clause entirely, even if it would be enforceable. The obvious way is to have another company do the modification.

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zozbot234 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The worthwhile question AIUI is whether AI weights are even protected by human copyright. Note that firms whose "core" value is their proprietary AI weights don't even need this (at least AIUI) since they always can fall back on "they are clearly protected against misappropriation, like a trade secret". It becomes more interesting wrt. openly available AI models.

	▲	Majromax 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The worthwhile question AIUI is whether AI weights are even protected by human copyright. I'm also deeply curious about this legal question. As I see it, model weights are the result of a mechanistic and lossy translation between training data and the final output weights. There is some human creativity involved, but that creativity is found exclusively in the model's code and training data, which are independently covered by copyright. Training is like a very expensive compilation process, and we have long-established that compiled artifacts are not distinct acts of creation. In the case of a proprietary model like Kimi, copyright might survive based on 'special sauce' training like reinforcement learning – although that competes against the argument that pretraining on copyrighted data is 'fair use' transformation. However, I can't see a good argument that a model trained on a fully public domain dataset (with a genuinely open-source architecture) could support a copyright claim.

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gillesjacobs 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They probably licensed it. Still a bit deceptive not to mention it on the model card/blog post, but companies whitelabel all the time without mentioning.

It goes against the ML community ethos to obscure it, but is common branding practice.

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deaux 5 hours ago | parent [-]

No they didn't [0][1]. With this leak they're probably negotiating as we speak, which could be why they've deleted the posts.

[0] https://chainthink.cn/zh-CN/news/113784276696010804

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HD2Ky9jW4AAAe0Y?format=jpg&name=...

	▲	gillesjacobs 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I stand corrected, that is pretty scummy. I bet Moonshot is going to make them open their wallets to avoid legal trouble.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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charcircuit 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Kimi K2.5 was released under a modified MIT license (100M+ MAU or $20M+ MRR has to prominently display Kimi K2.5). It will be fine.

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antirez 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Basically this is true for most startups in the world BUT Cursor, so here you are kinda inverting the logic of the matter. Cursor is at a size that, if they wanted to use K2.5, they could clearly state that it was K2.5 or get a license to avoid saying it.

	▲	NitpickLawyer 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IF we assume that the modified MIT clause is enforceable. And if we assume Cursor Inc. is running the modification. It could very well be the case that Cursor Research LTD is doing the modifications and re-licensing it to Cursor Inc. That would make any clause in the modified MIT moot.