Not to mention the cases where the AI labs would have lost in court so bailed and settled for billions. Just this week, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5B in a settlement to avoid losing a pretty cut and dry case.

▲ Diogenesian 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

To be clear that was one of the few resolved cases where the judge agreed training was fair use. But the piracy was enough of a distraction that I don't consider that a particularly useful precedent. I am much more interested in the NYT case, which quite clearly shows GPT was trained on NYT articles and can spit them out verbatim (and has since been validated by academic research; all the commercial models are capable of mass plagiarism).

▲ xienze 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5B in a settlement to avoid losing a pretty cut and dry case.

It takes two parties to agree to a settlement. That the other party agreed to a settlement instead of taking it to court implies this was not the slam dunk you may think it was.

▲ robocat 3 days ago | parent [-]

You're both reading tea leaves.

Settling just says that they expected the internal costs or risks to be more than 1.5 billion cashflow.

  In the $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation they said their run-rate revenue crossed $47B annualised.

With those numbers, there can be sound financial reasons for wanting to just get rid of the lawsuit.

Also if it ends up that other competitors also need to pay $1.5 billion, then maybe that does or doesn't have a competitive advantage.

Anthropic's business and legal strategies are not public. I would expect there to be multiple legs/reasons for settlement even for a decision below 1%. Trying to create a single narrative is what us spectators do.

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xienze 3 days ago | parent [-]

> With those numbers, there can be sound financial reasons for wanting to just get rid of the lawsuit.

Yes, of course, on Anthropic's side. Why would the other side agree to a settlement?

	▲	robocat 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Perhaps Anthropic is indirectly paying to have their competitors sued... My narritive is that the terms of the settlement would be full and final. It was a class action, with payment going to authors and publishers, and the legal team will get paid too. My guess is that funding is a major issue for the legal team. Authors presumably can't pay for lawyers unless a percentage of winnings, although publishers may have invested. But the legal team will ask the beneficiaries to use some of the warchest to fund different campaigns against every other AI company. I would assume the legal team wants to win again. They've now got a good story to sell to rights holders, who presumably like money and don't like risks. I haven't even got to my armchair yet this morning.
	▲	SR2Z 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Because most authors don't make a ton of money from their books, and even a relatively low settlement from Anthropic is a large enough sum that they're OK with taking it.