Proprietary model weights are IP, their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent, even for American businesses.

I don't think distillation as 'stealing IP' has any legal legs. They can probably claim violation of ToS at best because the terms of use do prohibit use for training rival models.

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sillysaurusx 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Proprietary model weights are IP

Not copyrightable IP, or at least it hasn't been challenged yet. I have experience with this: I made llama-dl, a way to download the original llama model. Meta issued a DMCA, I appealed to the HN community for funds, someone funded, and our lawyer successfully counterclaimed. Never heard from Meta again.

A lack of response to the counterclaim doesn't mean the issue is settled. But now there's legal precedent for people pushing back against companies that claim model weights are secret IP and therefore DMCA-able.

	▲	deaton 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I do wonder if their "fair use" argument preempts them from actually being able to claim copyright over the model weights, since it can be argued that the vast majority of what the model is is itself a remix of everything else. Maybe their RLHF, system prompts, architecture and training techniques can be considered copyrightable, but maybe most of the data can't.

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stusmall 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can't wrap my head around the idea that distillation is IP theft but mass training on books, music and art without consent is fair use. The two stances are incompatible. If it is transformative use of a book, it is transformative use of AI output.

	▲	munk-a 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I really hope that when a sane administration returns to power in the US we'll actually get a reckoning over how irrational it was to not restrict training data.
	▲	BoxOfRain 10 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah people in the US who want protectionism for US models on grounds of IP rights are appalling hypocrites. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander!

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

> Proprietary model weights are IP

I don't think they are. Not copyright at least. There may be some "trade secret" stuff for them but they're not copyrightable.

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Zigurd 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Trade secrets are easy to claim but hard to turn into a tort without having someone steal them. I'm sure some lawyer can come up with a filing that tries to make distillation an act of theft, but there would be many weak links in that chain.

Contrast this with Apple's case where it looks like they've got evidence of people walking out of the building with various physical artifacts on their way to an OpenAI interview.

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

Trade secrets are a type of IP.

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masfuerte 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yes, but if a company publishes its trade secrets on the web you are entitled to read them and use them.

	▲	munk-a 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Only if you're going to use them to train an LLM! Also, more seriously, there are plenty of pieces of information that are compelled to be published that don't lose their confidentiality. There actually is a general concept that confidentiality can be lost if you are negligent in its protection but it's a very nuanced thing.

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downrightmike an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And if an AI generated those wights, they are not copyrightable

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munk-a 10 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent

Assume that their model output is considered IP and that it's ruled illegal to train on that IP. I will offer to sell every content producer on earth an identity LLM that takes their content and outputs precisely identical content that they can then post. Good luck ever getting any training data for free ever again.