5 ms·

Not to be confused with gpt4all https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all which is a "free" GPT LLM. It seems this gpt4free was b

Not to be confused with gpt4all https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all which is a "free" GPT LLM. It seems this gpt4free was basically hijacking 3rd parties services that use GPT-4, bypassing the official OpenAI APIs in order to avoid paying for inference. Of course, that means that the hijacked 3rd parties are the ones footing the bill... I'm not surprised they have been issued a takedown notice.

gumballindie 4y ago
> Of course, that means that the hijacked 3rd parties are the ones footing the bill... A bit like we are footing the bill for openai's training data.
- jamesjuicy55 4y ago
  [flagged]
- ivalm 4y ago
  They are providing a service, we pay for it, and they reinvest in improving the service. That’s the basic business practice.
  - dubcanada 4y ago
    I think you missed the memo of the comment. They were referring to the fact that everything ChatGPT is built on is other peoples work. Beyond the actual building of the model details, there is nothing that ChatGPT owns. All the content they use to train, all of the art they use to train. Everything is stolen/used without permission. Obviously there is more to it than that, because you published it on the internet. But that's a different topic.
    - px43 4y ago
      Everything that anyone has ever built is built on the works of others. This is how we progress as a species. The entire reason why the internet is so revolutionary is that it allows for permissionless innovation.
      - dubcanada 4y ago
        I am in no way suggesting that it is wrong. I do however feel this level of "built upon the work of others" is different.
      - whitepaint 4y ago
        Right, so what's the problem with gpt4free then?
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        They're consuming real electricity and real time on servers that don't belong to them nor do they have permission to use.
        ChatGTP 4y ago
        Do you see the contradiction here ? ChatGPT-4 is built on real peoples time.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Conveniently ignoring the ‘real electricity’ part doesn’t help your case.
      - vkou 4y ago
        Then OpenAI should allow us to do some permissionless innovation on their work. Strangly enough, it's only interested in promoting permissionless innovation when it stands to profit. It plunders the commons, and gives nothing unencumbered back.
    - jstummbillig 4y ago
      This litany is already getting old and it's just 2 month in. All intellectual property is inherently stolen. Just let it go.
      - cormacrelf 4y ago
        The reason intellectual property was invented was to encourage people to go and create new things and share them, the logic being that having a monopoly on your own work by default means you can make money from being creative and therefore people will choose to do it. The reverse is already happening, people are deciding (privately) not to publish things they have created because they rightly assume it will be stolen by an AI, monetised and used to destroy their own job. It is not merely complaining for its own sake. There is a good amount of theft and a bad amount of theft. As theft increases unchecked the amount of new output is poised to decline.
        jstummbillig 4y ago
        All true. I don't see any world where it matters in the slightest. When it comes to how we deal with currently available training data nothing will change, first because of politics but also because people want the LLMs superpower more than they want to protect IP of a few individuals. And I firmly believe that no human training data that has not been produced and publishes today will play any significant role in future AI development. We are simply too slow.
      - chefandy 4y ago
        The topic's biggest cop-out. Intellectual property doesn't exist in a vacuum. I have limited-to-zero sympathy for corporate entities like Getty images that hoard IP, but our society's social contract says labor isn't free unless people donate it. We need to implement some sort of alternate compensation system before entirely disregarding IP so we don't pull the rug out from under perfectly honest independent creatives with kids and mortgages and medical bills plying their craft in an established system. Until then, taking the fruits of creative labor without permission is theft that is much more consequential and much less morally defensible than what you describe. I'll bet if someone outside of our IP jurisdiction figured out a way to reliably and thoroughly reverse engineer the most complex commercial software from binaries so people could spit out a working, fully-customized copy of a commercial application from a prompt, and the entirety of the software development market would soon collapse, the tenor of this conversation would be very different. Maybe the people with the very ethically defensible stance that private property is theft would be totally fine with OpenAI knocking down your home to build their new headquarters without compensating you? Imagine the progress! (hint: they probably wouldn't be ok with it) None of this stuff exists in a vacuum. None of it.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      If we enforced intellectual property rights that harshly, nothing more complex than a 6502 would have ever been made.
      - dubcanada 4y ago
        I personally don't think IP has a place in modern society. But I was mostly replying to the authors comment. My concerns mostly lie with the fact it's owned largely by $MSFT rather than a more "open source" contributing to society entity. But again that's a much different topic.
        devmor 4y ago
        I'd say IP is more important in modern society than at any time in history. It shouldn't have a place, but so long as people require the ownership of their own concepts to gain food and shelter, it has to.
    - Kiro 4y ago
      Imagine considering your random posts on reddit "work" and thinking people are stealing it when they train their models on your internet drivel.
      - salad-tycoon 4y ago
        All the misguided comments of my younger years coming to haunt me? Nightmare. Luckily I deleted my live journal many moons ago.
      - msla 4y ago
        So it's valueless when the original author wants it to have value and valuable when OpenAI wants it to have value? I am all for training AIs, but at least exhibit some self-consistency in your arguments!
        squeaky-clean 4y ago
        A penny is close to valueless. A trillion pennies is a lot of value.
    - glitchc 4y ago
      This is an incorrect and unfair statement that would not pass the test in any court of law. ChatGPT uniquely orders information in a way that gives them a competitive advantage in the marketplace. While the source information is public, the ordering of it is proprietary and a trade secret. Your argument is a reductio ad absurdum to "everything is made of atoms and no one ones atoms, ergo no one owns anything."
      - mcguire 4y ago
        The source information in public? Copyright isn't a thing anymore? That's news to me.
        glitchc 4y ago
        If you think ChatGPT has infringed on your copyright, you have legal recourse. Do you have evidence?
    - dcow 4y ago
      I'm sorry but you can't honestly use stolen without permission here. If you publish something and someone else acquires it legally (because you published it for free or because they paid for or otherwise obtained a license to it) then you don't get to control how the work is used after the fact. You only control the terms of them receiving a copy. You can't say "I didn't want my work used for AI training data when I published it so it's all stolen as far as I'm concerned". It just doesn't work that way. Now that doesn't mean you can't license your work for exclusive use by humans and explicitly forbid AI training data in the license applied to your work, but you'd have to do that when you publish it, not retroactively.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Block access if you don't want them to access your data. No bills created. However, if AI ends up being as mainstream as the average HN user is claiming, are you sure you aren't shooting yourself in the foot to not have your brand and product info not included in that data set if it replaces search engines? Is it any different from a Google crawler? They put ads on your content on the SERPs after crawling it.
  - gumballindie 4y ago
    Google drives traffic to your website, and generates revenue. It also respects IP and gives credit. Ai crawlers don't. Just because content is out in the open it doesn't mean there's no license to follow when using it. If they gave credit, respected IP and drove traffic then sure.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      Whilst I'm not an AI proponent, Bing cites sources in the form of sites, thus driving traffic, so that's not strictly true. Bing seems to be somewhat of a sensation currently with consumers.
      - gumballindie 4y ago
        I am not against ai and i am open to any ai tools that give credit or satisfy the requirements of the license of whatever they ingested. Ai is good, theft is not. So if bing plays by the rules then thats great.
- mock-possum 4y ago
  who's 'we,' white man? I've never been billed.
  - gumballindie 4y ago
    > white man? Eh? > I've never been billed. Curious how much people's bills are inflated by ai crawlers constantly sucking their data and how much in revenue is lost since traffic is not brought to their websites. And since there's no way to stop this theft, since most of them don't honor robots.txt, people are forced to remove content. Perhaps those charged for bandwidth are losing some dime right now.
    - jsnell 4y ago
      > Eh? It's the punchline of a vaguely racist old joke involving Lone Ranger and Tonto. I have to admit that I also often think of when somebody uses "we" inappropriately to make their opinion or experience appear universal. (But as seen here, you can't really just drop the punchline into a conversation.)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - mock-possum 4y ago
      Sorry that’s my bad, I forget not everyone knows that reference.
  - hohg 4y ago
    The phrase "Who's 'we,' white man?" is a reference to a scene in the 1991 film "Grand Canyon." In the scene, a wealthy white man tries to help a stranded African American man in a dangerous part of town. The African American man responds to the white man's offer of help with the question "Who's 'we,' white man?" which is a critique of the white man's assumption that they are part of the same group. The phrase has since been used in various contexts to challenge assumptions of shared identity or experience.
KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
Why is OpenAI getting involved? They are getting paid either way. The third parties should do the takedown if they are not happy about their endpoint being scraped.
- drusepth 4y ago
  Presumably, they're looking out for their paying users (see: they want to keep those paying users), who would have a terrible experience if and when they found out someone else had been using their APIs and/or API keys.
jrochkind1 4y ago
It's not clear to me that DMCA Takedown is an applicable legal process for that, but I guess when does that ever stop anyone these days. What specific US laws do folks think that repo (or running/using the software in that repo) might have been violating? (I agree it seems likely that it's _some_ law, I'm not challenging that just asking if anyone has a legal analysis they want to share).
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  CFAA[0] is one that comes to mind but I also think that has different issues with what might be overly vague terminology. It at least seems more applicable to this, though I am certainly not a legal expert. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
  - henryfjordan 4y ago
    There was a somewhat recent supreme court ruling that said just breaking some ToS is not a CFAA violation. Unless the gpt4free repo had straight up stolen credentials the CFAA shouldn't apply.
- heyyyouu 4y ago
  It's an excellent point. DMCA is for copyright. My take (I have a background in this area but IANAL): I think they can get away with the copyright because of the name/content usage (no one of the opposite end of the request is going to question that, it seems obvious), but I think it's clear to those in the know that's not WHY they went after this one. In theory, they could probably use DCMA to go after anyone using the terms (right or wrong). In practicality, they used it as a tool to go after this particular one because they didn't like what they were doing.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    DMCA covers circumvention devices, not just directly infringing material.

gumballindie 4y ago

> Of course, that means that the hijacked 3rd parties are the ones footing the bill... A bit like we are footing the bill for openai's training data.

jamesjuicy55 4y ago
[flagged]
ivalm 4y ago
They are providing a service, we pay for it, and they reinvest in improving the service. That’s the basic business practice.
- dubcanada 4y ago
  I think you missed the memo of the comment. They were referring to the fact that everything ChatGPT is built on is other peoples work. Beyond the actual building of the model details, there is nothing that ChatGPT owns. All the content they use to train, all of the art they use to train. Everything is stolen/used without permission. Obviously there is more to it than that, because you published it on the internet. But that's a different topic.
  - px43 4y ago
    Everything that anyone has ever built is built on the works of others. This is how we progress as a species. The entire reason why the internet is so revolutionary is that it allows for permissionless innovation.
    - dubcanada 4y ago
      I am in no way suggesting that it is wrong. I do however feel this level of "built upon the work of others" is different.
    - whitepaint 4y ago
      Right, so what's the problem with gpt4free then?
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        They're consuming real electricity and real time on servers that don't belong to them nor do they have permission to use.
        ChatGTP 4y ago
        Do you see the contradiction here ? ChatGPT-4 is built on real peoples time.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Conveniently ignoring the ‘real electricity’ part doesn’t help your case.
    - vkou 4y ago
      Then OpenAI should allow us to do some permissionless innovation on their work. Strangly enough, it's only interested in promoting permissionless innovation when it stands to profit. It plunders the commons, and gives nothing unencumbered back.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    This litany is already getting old and it's just 2 month in. All intellectual property is inherently stolen. Just let it go.
    - cormacrelf 4y ago
      The reason intellectual property was invented was to encourage people to go and create new things and share them, the logic being that having a monopoly on your own work by default means you can make money from being creative and therefore people will choose to do it. The reverse is already happening, people are deciding (privately) not to publish things they have created because they rightly assume it will be stolen by an AI, monetised and used to destroy their own job. It is not merely complaining for its own sake. There is a good amount of theft and a bad amount of theft. As theft increases unchecked the amount of new output is poised to decline.
      - jstummbillig 4y ago
        All true. I don't see any world where it matters in the slightest. When it comes to how we deal with currently available training data nothing will change, first because of politics but also because people want the LLMs superpower more than they want to protect IP of a few individuals. And I firmly believe that no human training data that has not been produced and publishes today will play any significant role in future AI development. We are simply too slow.
    - chefandy 4y ago
      The topic's biggest cop-out. Intellectual property doesn't exist in a vacuum. I have limited-to-zero sympathy for corporate entities like Getty images that hoard IP, but our society's social contract says labor isn't free unless people donate it. We need to implement some sort of alternate compensation system before entirely disregarding IP so we don't pull the rug out from under perfectly honest independent creatives with kids and mortgages and medical bills plying their craft in an established system. Until then, taking the fruits of creative labor without permission is theft that is much more consequential and much less morally defensible than what you describe. I'll bet if someone outside of our IP jurisdiction figured out a way to reliably and thoroughly reverse engineer the most complex commercial software from binaries so people could spit out a working, fully-customized copy of a commercial application from a prompt, and the entirety of the software development market would soon collapse, the tenor of this conversation would be very different. Maybe the people with the very ethically defensible stance that private property is theft would be totally fine with OpenAI knocking down your home to build their new headquarters without compensating you? Imagine the progress! (hint: they probably wouldn't be ok with it) None of this stuff exists in a vacuum. None of it.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    If we enforced intellectual property rights that harshly, nothing more complex than a 6502 would have ever been made.
    - dubcanada 4y ago
      I personally don't think IP has a place in modern society. But I was mostly replying to the authors comment. My concerns mostly lie with the fact it's owned largely by $MSFT rather than a more "open source" contributing to society entity. But again that's a much different topic.
      - devmor 4y ago
        I'd say IP is more important in modern society than at any time in history. It shouldn't have a place, but so long as people require the ownership of their own concepts to gain food and shelter, it has to.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    Imagine considering your random posts on reddit "work" and thinking people are stealing it when they train their models on your internet drivel.
    - salad-tycoon 4y ago
      All the misguided comments of my younger years coming to haunt me? Nightmare. Luckily I deleted my live journal many moons ago.
    - msla 4y ago
      So it's valueless when the original author wants it to have value and valuable when OpenAI wants it to have value? I am all for training AIs, but at least exhibit some self-consistency in your arguments!
      - squeaky-clean 4y ago
        A penny is close to valueless. A trillion pennies is a lot of value.
  - glitchc 4y ago
    This is an incorrect and unfair statement that would not pass the test in any court of law. ChatGPT uniquely orders information in a way that gives them a competitive advantage in the marketplace. While the source information is public, the ordering of it is proprietary and a trade secret. Your argument is a reductio ad absurdum to "everything is made of atoms and no one ones atoms, ergo no one owns anything."
    - mcguire 4y ago
      The source information in public? Copyright isn't a thing anymore? That's news to me.
      - glitchc 4y ago
        If you think ChatGPT has infringed on your copyright, you have legal recourse. Do you have evidence?
  - dcow 4y ago
    I'm sorry but you can't honestly use stolen without permission here. If you publish something and someone else acquires it legally (because you published it for free or because they paid for or otherwise obtained a license to it) then you don't get to control how the work is used after the fact. You only control the terms of them receiving a copy. You can't say "I didn't want my work used for AI training data when I published it so it's all stolen as far as I'm concerned". It just doesn't work that way. Now that doesn't mean you can't license your work for exclusive use by humans and explicitly forbid AI training data in the license applied to your work, but you'd have to do that when you publish it, not retroactively.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Block access if you don't want them to access your data. No bills created. However, if AI ends up being as mainstream as the average HN user is claiming, are you sure you aren't shooting yourself in the foot to not have your brand and product info not included in that data set if it replaces search engines? Is it any different from a Google crawler? They put ads on your content on the SERPs after crawling it.
- gumballindie 4y ago
  Google drives traffic to your website, and generates revenue. It also respects IP and gives credit. Ai crawlers don't. Just because content is out in the open it doesn't mean there's no license to follow when using it. If they gave credit, respected IP and drove traffic then sure.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Whilst I'm not an AI proponent, Bing cites sources in the form of sites, thus driving traffic, so that's not strictly true. Bing seems to be somewhat of a sensation currently with consumers.
    - gumballindie 4y ago
      I am not against ai and i am open to any ai tools that give credit or satisfy the requirements of the license of whatever they ingested. Ai is good, theft is not. So if bing plays by the rules then thats great.
mock-possum 4y ago
who's 'we,' white man? I've never been billed.
- gumballindie 4y ago
  > white man? Eh? > I've never been billed. Curious how much people's bills are inflated by ai crawlers constantly sucking their data and how much in revenue is lost since traffic is not brought to their websites. And since there's no way to stop this theft, since most of them don't honor robots.txt, people are forced to remove content. Perhaps those charged for bandwidth are losing some dime right now.
  - jsnell 4y ago
    > Eh? It's the punchline of a vaguely racist old joke involving Lone Ranger and Tonto. I have to admit that I also often think of when somebody uses "we" inappropriately to make their opinion or experience appear universal. (But as seen here, you can't really just drop the punchline into a conversation.)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - mock-possum 4y ago
    Sorry that’s my bad, I forget not everyone knows that reference.
- hohg 4y ago
  The phrase "Who's 'we,' white man?" is a reference to a scene in the 1991 film "Grand Canyon." In the scene, a wealthy white man tries to help a stranded African American man in a dangerous part of town. The African American man responds to the white man's offer of help with the question "Who's 'we,' white man?" which is a critique of the white man's assumption that they are part of the same group. The phrase has since been used in various contexts to challenge assumptions of shared identity or experience.

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago

Why is OpenAI getting involved? They are getting paid either way. The third parties should do the takedown if they are not happy about their endpoint being scraped.

drusepth 4y ago
Presumably, they're looking out for their paying users (see: they want to keep those paying users), who would have a terrible experience if and when they found out someone else had been using their APIs and/or API keys.

jrochkind1 4y ago

It's not clear to me that DMCA Takedown is an applicable legal process for that, but I guess when does that ever stop anyone these days. What specific US laws do folks think that repo (or running/using the software in that repo) might have been violating? (I agree it seems likely that it's _some_ law, I'm not challenging that just asking if anyone has a legal analysis they want to share).

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
CFAA[0] is one that comes to mind but I also think that has different issues with what might be overly vague terminology. It at least seems more applicable to this, though I am certainly not a legal expert. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
- henryfjordan 4y ago
  There was a somewhat recent supreme court ruling that said just breaking some ToS is not a CFAA violation. Unless the gpt4free repo had straight up stolen credentials the CFAA shouldn't apply.
heyyyouu 4y ago
It's an excellent point. DMCA is for copyright. My take (I have a background in this area but IANAL): I think they can get away with the copyright because of the name/content usage (no one of the opposite end of the request is going to question that, it seems obvious), but I think it's clear to those in the know that's not WHY they went after this one. In theory, they could probably use DCMA to go after anyone using the terms (right or wrong). In practicality, they used it as a tool to go after this particular one because they didn't like what they were doing.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  DMCA covers circumvention devices, not just directly infringing material.