Given these models could not have been trained in the first place if they had to license every line of random fan fiction on the internet, I think distillation also being fair game is a tradeoff everyone should be willing to take (unless they want to decelerate, but that's a different conversation).

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andriy_koval 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Us models didnt pay for licenses too

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joe_mamba 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We're still in the early days of the AI industry timeline(relative to traditional industries). Not everything has yet been litigated.

Taxes on AI subscriptions or AI capable hardware, to financially compensate IP holders for (potential) IP theft, could very well arrive in the near future, once the industry is mature.

If this shocks you and sounds preposterous, I'll remind you that in several EU countries, we still pay extra taxes on any and all storage mediums and on devices with built-in storage (tapes, CDs, DVDs, HDDs, SSDs, tablets, phones, etc) simply because they can be used to store pirated content, decisions based on laws from 50-100 years ago, and the money goes to the national unions and associations of music and arts IP holders. It's basically a lobby pushed and government legalized extortion racket that no voter agrees with or can change but has no choice but to conform either way.

So I guarantee you in the future, it will be the same for AI subscriptions and hardware capable of running LLMs locally. Every time you purchase a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, an Nvidia GPU, Intel/AMD SoC PC or an Apple/Qualcomm powered smartphone, you'll pay a government enforced tax to the likes of Sony, Axel Springer, etc. for licensing their IP, whether you want to or not. In the EU at least. US maybe not.

	▲	andriy_koval 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think we are going to direction where AI corps will have stronger lobby compared to IP holders.

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tristanj 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is incorrect. Anthropic paid $1.5 billion in compensation to copyright holders for use of their content in training data. OpenAI pays hundreds of millions per year across 150+ licensing deals for access to copyrighted data. Meta and Alphabet have similar arrangements.

Under the settlement, Anthropic was forced to delete the pirated data they were training on.

Chinese labs can still train on pirated data. I doubt the Chinese models operate under similar licensing agreements.

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orangecat 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Anthropic paid $1.5 billion in compensation to copyright holders for use of their content in training data.

The payment was for illegally downloading copyrighted material, not training. Training was explicitly ruled to be fair use.

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tristanj 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Partially correct. The court explicitly ruled that training on pirated data, which is what Anthropic was doing, is not considered fair use.

Training on legally acquired / licensed data is potentially fair use.

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3836293648 an hour ago | parent [-]

It's not potentially, it's settled. At least for now as neither case wanted to move on to appeals

	▲	tristanj an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not at all. The ruling came from a federal district court, and since it was settled early, it was never reviewed by a higher court. It doesn't set a national precedent across the U.S. And other district courts don't agree on this. The US district court for Delaware recently rejected a fair use defense for the use of copyrighted works to train AI. https://www.reedsmith.com/articles/court-ai-fair-use-thomson... There are more cases in the pipeline. The massive NYT vs OpenAI is still ongoing. Nothing will be "settled" until this makes its way to the Supreme Court or Congress steps in.

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andriy_koval 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

they didn't pay yet, because court challenged settlement as inadequate.

> I doubt the Chinese models operate under similar licensing agreements.

US corps likely pay licenses when afraid to be sued, or have troubles getting that data, otherwise they just take data, which was demonstrated many times. The same apply to Chinese corps, alibaba totally can be sued in US.

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tristanj 2 hours ago | parent [-]

China is infamous for weakly enforcing copyright law. Even when it is completely obvious that Chinese labs are training models on pirated data, US copyright holders face a virtually impossible task of proving it in court. Those lawsuits won't go anywhere.

	▲	andriy_koval 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are tons of lawsuites which resulted in banning Chinese companies from doing business in US, those lawsuits totally have consequences.

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beambot 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They settled with a subset of copyright holders. Guarantee they violated lots of others' rights in the process

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codedokode 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They only paid when they got caught. And not to everyone.

	▲	tristanj 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But they still paid. I don't see any Chinese labs paying billion dollar infringement settlements. Chinese labs can freely train on pirated material, which is a structural advantage.

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polotics 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

really!? nobody paid me anything for my comments on HN.

	▲	eichin 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The only ones getting paid this time around had registered copyrights (in the US at that.)

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maximus_01 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Let’s not forget that Anthropic only paid that to settle a class action lawsuit.

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yogthos an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They used two of my books and I'm still waiting for my cheque here.

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idiotsecant 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's like saying someone is a big proponent of community law and order, and they donated $1000 to the county sheriff when actually they got caught drunk speeding in a school zone.

	▲	tristanj 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A false equivalence. A more correct example is: Anthropic was speeding, got caught by the county sheriff, and paid the fine. Anthropic stopped speeding. Meanwhile, Chinese labs are speeding in a different county. Everyone knows they are speeding, yet the sheriff won't pull them over, so they just keep doing it. This lax enforcement gives Chinese labs a structural advantage over American ones.

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ForHackernews 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

After the fact. They did the same thing Youtube, Uber and Airbnb did: Break the law, eventually get caught, cut some deal where they pay a pittance and keep doing the same thing but now with leverage on their side.

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ttoinou 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because they got caught

there is much less intellectual property in China so it’s not ‘theft’ (as you can’t put property on information)