Between the two of them, only one firm is trying to pull up the ladder so that no one else can have what it took.

Why? Should we be held hostage to the whims of these companies and all the investors in the throes of AI psychosis, and let them do whatever the fuck they want, because if we don't then the economy will crash?

No you should not care unless you are a shareholder in one of these Ai ponzi companies. For the rest of the world Chinese companies matching and open sourcing llm's will keep 100 or so tech oligarchs taking over all the world economic output for themselves as all the idiot politician are unwilling to tax wealth.

Why so? If I'm from Europe or South America, should I hope Anthropic/Openai win?

Why?

Serious question.

I'm from the US, and I think it's hilarious.

Why?

Did I say there was no value add in the inputs?

Ore has value, a different kind of value than the output of the refinery.

Yes, I get that, but it's only now the issues are coming into the commons in a way that industry / society needs the regulatory clarity.

It's completey insane that we still don't know how Open Source would work, that the laws are vague and we're still technically waiting for the courts to decide on cases.

The government should a) legislate and b) create test cases and run them through the courts so that we can have clarity.

The claim these companies make goes much, much further than that.

They claim LLMs "uncopyright" their inputs. So if I take, say, 50 Mickey Mouse comic books, tell ChatGPT to read them and produce 50 "Buster Beagle" comic books that there is ZERO "copyright contamination" and I own those 50 output comics without Disney having any claims on them whatsoever.

Or if I ask ChatGPT to "make a spreadsheet software like Excel, Sheets, Calc, ..." that, again, there is zero copyright claim possible from these people.

It has not been tested, of course.

If turning other peoples copyrighted work into a model is transformative enough to be protected then so is distilling that model into a different, better, model.

there is a major god complex here.

MBAs and non technical managers = inept Catbert-type charlatans.

Software engineers, devs, etc = geniuses capable of mastering any domain, innate ability to be right on any topic.

I don't think that's what it's saying at all. It's saying that there's a level of creativity in model creation that isn't present in distillation.

No? They outright say the opposite!

Like look, I'm not a native speaker, sure. But I think when someone says "value add", that means there was value there (which you claim they're rhetorically erasing), and then that was added to. Under no interpretation of this phrase do I get an erasure of prior value.

So certainly, as long as words mean anything, no, they absolutely did not say or suggest what you claim they did, and what you extract a thus unreasonable amount of obnoxious schadenfreude from, while throwing in a cheap insult for funsies at the end.

It's the second time I feel compelled to reach for this just today: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108...

This is a misrepresentation though.

The LLM output, is not the same as the input - there is value add.

Of course works used as raw inputs to LLMs required work and are reasonably subject to IP concerns - but they are different.

It's possible that the LLM makers 'owe' the content creators that created the content they used to make their products - it's an interesting but separate question.

We could very well end up where content IP is protected, LLM output is not and visa versa with reasonable legal founding, doubtful but plausible.

It sure is, but it doesn't matter. Whatever position that generates more economic activity is declared legal using some nonsense retconned logic "because we said so".

Distillation is objectively easier than training a model from scratch, that's why all these Chinese labs are doing it.

Let me explain it this way: If it is legal for a human to learn from a book, then disseminate the knowledge, then it is legal for a machine to do so. You may think this is not right because a machine does it at a much larger scale, but if so laws need to be updated. As it stands now there is no law that says if a human does X it is not a copyright violation but if a machine does the same X it is copyright violation.

If it is legal for a human to do something then it is legal for a machine to do it too. Are there any counter examples to that?

It's worth keeping in mind the purpose of copyright. It's a pragmatic tool to encourage investment in creative work for the benefit of everybody/consumers. We may be entering a time where there's less need to incentivize people to write books. At least not non-fiction books which are simply a collection of existing knowledge presented in an a way that's suitable for human readers. A lot of the value those authors provided can now be done by AI. Yes, the AI trained on their work, but now that it's here, we don't need new non-fiction authors quite as much as we used to.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where technology or general people's wellbeing was held back by obsolete laws that ended up lingering on just to protect undeserving special people at the expense of the rest of society. Remember guilds for tradesmen? They were also a monopoly given by the government to special people. They had their purpose but nowadays we have different ways to keep tradesmen working effectively like license requirements and insurance.

Just to be clear, I think we do still need copyright, but that we might be in a transition period where it has to be redesigned to adapt to AI.

Did they borrow the book? If I learn from a borrowed book is that copyright infringement?

I recommend reading some of their research it's honestly astonishing how intelligent some of their solutions are.

Kimi specifically relies heavily on reasoning traces which is largely due to their training strategy and will perform poorly when thrown into a conversation from another model. Another fun advancement is that they simply ctrl+c ctrl+v'd attention which means that the model can steer where to look in the context window without ever producing an output token increasing token efficiency and attention accuracy as a side effect you end up with weaker prompt adherence.

None of these 'issues' manifest in US models which proves that kimi has diverged and is achieving these capabilities seperately from the architecture that US labs rely on.

I would agree with you during the Deepseek R1 era, but US labs were heavily inspired by open research at that point as well so I wouldn't give them too much credit.

Spot-on and you're asking the right questions. And the other problem in these comments is that folks seem to think if China pulls ahead we can't just distill their models, provided that distillation is a key part of "this". If it's such a great strategy we'll just use it too if we want to. Boom roasted.

For some reason folks seem to think that China can take action and then other countries can't also take action or respond to that action and it comes up again and again. China has hypersonic missiles! Pack it up boys time to go home. Nothing we can do. Dang shucks. China distilled American AI models, welp time to just close it all down and let's just write off those trillions of dollars and all the literal geniuses financing and building these things. Oh well China can just copy American models while we spend all the money! Ok we just stop developing models and we'll just copy their models. China will flood the market with their cheap products! Nope can't do anything like, oh, idk, not buy any of those products or just raise the prices on them in local markets. It's never-ending. I don't understand the lack of capacity to reason about other actors that takes commonly takes place. And that's just China, never mind other general issues.

> and if Anthropic hadn't released Fable, would we have Kimi today? If the answer is no, then I think that's still a very important point to consider.

That works both ways, competition and performance spur new developments. You don't think the American labs are looking at Chinese research on how to reduce compute per token?

Not really. Go ask someone in Tibet/HongKong/Taiwan/Japan/India if China isn't breaking rules and bullying them. If China had US's powers/economy, it would be a much bigger bully.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_warrior_diplomacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

For me, when it specifically comes to copying, I don't think it's bad to copy a copier. (And by that I mean Anthropic has no valid complaints against Moonshot. Any valid complaints from anyone in the original corpus are valid against both of them now.)

In this way, it is different from literal theft. Stealing money/objects from a thief and keeping them is not justified.

I don't really have an oar in this water, but...

"Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot"

https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/judge-approves-15b-...

> I think theft is bad everywhere, not just when Anthropic does it.

It seems like you think theft is bad everywhere except when Anthropic does it.

Not OP, but copyright law is an absolute joke. No, I don’t care one whit that someone’s TOS was violated. In fact, I find it hilarious. And it’s not “theft.”

It's a rational position to care about the law, but insist on a queue when related parties are involved.

In this case: resolve the theft claims against the US frontier labs, and only then let them make claims against third parties. It would be totally unreasonable for (say) OpenAI to extract a settlement from Moonshot and use that to pay its own claims. Ordering matters.

no, I don't care about thieves getting stolen from. why would I?

If the law was applied uniformly, I would support its continued uniform application. In the last 10 years, I don't see it being applied fairly at all, I see an oligarchy, a criminal and corrupt government and rich and powerful entities getting away with anything. The most minimally competent legal system would ask the AI companies, show us the list of all the data you've used to train and lets hash out the copyright - instead we have to pray someone leaks one tiny piece of what they trained on and then sue for that. Open-weights models are the closest thing we have to justice in the world where the legal system no longer provides justice, because at least the model trained on all of our data is given back to all of us.

I find that I care more when copyright violations cause actual harm to the copyright owner. Let's say there's an American kid who can't speak Japanese but wants to keep up with a weekly manga. He downloads a bootleg translation and shares it among his friend group. That is a copyright violation, but meh. If he hadn't gone the illegal route, he'd more likely just not read it at all. There's very little chance he'd pay for a subscription and learn Japanese.

Now, if that kid were to print the bootleg translation and sell it to schoolmates, that's worth a slap on the wrist. The kids willing to pay would likely have paid for official copies.

When these LLM labs download our works, feed them into their models, and sell the output to people that used to pay for our work, that's worth a very hard slap. I honestly have less of a problem with the open models.

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This is mostly just to reiterate myself as the original question was "Does this matter?"

Everything else is simply justifying why it shouldn't, the specifics don't really matter as there is no legal framework to stop china from continuing to distill models and anthropic has proven they cannot use software solutions to stop it either as distillation is still a problem. But I do still believe it wouldn't hold up in court either way as stopping companies from generating training data which was trained on the entire human knowledge corpus is just stealing from thieves and making it 'open' once again so the argument only gets weaker.

edit: to add, the mickey mouse / nyc was because anthropic trained on LICENSED works, not apple to oranges. The original work it was reciting was licensed and not licensed BY anthropic.

What precedents can you cite and specific examples of their applicability. That is, what would Anthropic's lawyers take to court? You can't say because there's nothing there that couldn't be ripped apart by the least legally capable community known to man, HN. That's why no lab has succeeded in a suit anything like what you're claiming could happen. The only reason Anthropic or any other lab would pursue this is political or commercial. They're either looking for help from officials or they're trying to establish a particular market position.

>"1) its not illegal (it is)"

I am a practical man. From what I see laws are mostly for common folks and often do not even serve real justice. The higher one goes and the amount of money / power involved the more the laws bend and on international level the only law that matters is the size of one's club and willingness to use it. And when the country with supposedly biggest one starts crying I find it laughable.

Well, if you're solving the -root- problem, then Moonshot would have had nothing to "steal" if Anthropic didn't "steal" it first.

You could have gained that stuff prior to LLMs. The leg up you're describing is free information on the internet, not AI. AI just makes it a little easier to find, while also crushing the original sources in the process. (Even if it had a broken culture, is stack overflow even going to exist in a year? Where are they going to train on going forward?)

Democratization of information, but Sam Altman gets a $100B net worth and I'm still broke :)

I would prefer some sort of democratiziation of the money made from the democratization of information as well

Not to be an arse, but didn't you have access to Stack Overflow with all questions/answers prior to LLMs?

Those were told "find another job" and in fact they were able to find different jobs.

AI companies are gleefully bragging and "making humans obsolete", "permanent underclass" and 40% unemployment rates they plan to create.

They pushed to replace people years BEFORE their technology even can produce that work.

So, you know, it is not the same. But also in fact, clerks did disliked when occasionally arrogant claimed to replace them while pushing unfinished software that dont quite work yet.

So having tons of AIs quoting various literary works and reproducing knock-offs of them has a positive effect on those books' sales?

I think you're wrong: there is absolutely damage to the authors and publishers from what the AI companies have done.

If you steal an unpopular product from a store, the damage is also only to "potential profits", so how does that differ? It's entirely possible no one would have purchased the product and it would have eventually been discarded/destroyed.

Or with services, if a barber cuts your hair and then you run away without paying them, do you not consider that theft, even though there's no change in ownership occurring?

This is almost funny to me, because in many jurisdictions, software companies sure invested a lot of effort into painting people copying software as thieves. In Germany, they (the software producer lobby, and later politicians influence by the former) even coined and spread the term "Raubkopie", which you could roughly translate as "robbed copy", i.e., that's one step worse than "theft", as a robbery in Germany legally means " theft accomplished by force or intimidation". So, yeah: like putting a knife to the throat of someone while you copy the software.

So, after literally decades of investing into advertising campaigns, lobbying to politicians to pass harsher and harsher laws against software "thieves and robbers", now that big tech are doing it, suddenly we are supposed to consider it with more nuance?

Ahhh... no thank you sir. I really enjoy them drinking their own kool-aid.

Generating a set of weights is not learning.

Great! Neither is distillation then.

Machines are not humans.