4 ms·

Are we celebrating theft from tech companies now?

• tjranagk 4y ago
  Their model was trained on vast amounts of copied data. Is making a copy of their model really much different?
• anaganisk 4y ago
  I mean highseas, adblockers, bypassing paywalls, each one of them is theft. But on the flipside, companies are constantly trying to keep the ownership of data we paid for full price, scooping up personal data, selling low quality work behind paywall.
• antibasilisk 4y ago
  Copying isn't theft. If you bought the ssd it belongs to you in its entirety regardless what state you decide to configure it into.
• 7to2 4y ago
  This isn't theft by any common definition. End of argument. Now you could try to argue that it's copyright infringement but there are many solid arguments as to why these model weights don't meet the threshold of copyrightability. You could also try to argue distribution of trade secrets, but facebook doesn't seem to view them as such - shared with little restrictions to anyone with an accedemic email, no vetting or ndas, etc. I personally think that facebook planned all of this (sans the childish behavior occurring on their github repo, maybe). They probably wanted to release a capable language model publicly but didn't want the legal and social liabilities associated with it. Facebook is no stranger to keeping things secret. I simply refuse to believe that they didn't see this happening. (Thank you, Facebook!)
• squokko 4y ago
  Yes