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I understand that LLMs to date have mostly been trained on a wide variety of copyright-encumbered data but in other domains (computer vision for example) the tr

I understand that LLMs to date have mostly been trained on a wide variety of copyright-encumbered data but in other domains (computer vision for example) the tradeoffs are different and in practice many models are trained on private / unencumbered data. If those weights are not protected by copyright then my concern is it will be hard to sufficiently protect them via license agreement and it will become yet another factor favoring the SaaSification of everything in tech.

idiotsecant 3y ago
Is it useful to protect weights with copyright? What if I download your weights and retrain them for 5 seconds, changing each weight .0000001%? How much change is a new product? What if I change a single weight?
- hedgehog 3y ago
  Like the parallel scenarios of taking a book and changing a few words, slapping a new logo on someone else's app, or stylizing a photo with a filter, those are questions that will be answered in court if people can't come to an agreement on their own.
sillysaurusx 3y ago
This is true, and it's why I hesitated to file legal action. My goal was to benefit hackers. If the outcome causes problems for people who are just trying to share their work, I'd be upset. Ultimately what convinced me to proceed is that there are immense forces pressuring ML models to become SaaS companies. It's very difficult to offer an ML model for extended periods without being a company. E.g. https://6b.eleuther.ai/ https://6b.eleuther.ai/ is down. Eleuther failing illustrates just how hard it is –– we were all working as hard as we could to design something that would last a long time, and a long time turned out to be two short years. Contrast that with other kinds of hacking (e.g. webdev, gamedev, hardware...) where the end result lasts basically forever. So if ML models aren't copyrightable, I think it'll hurt companies a lot more than individuals. In fact the goal is the other way around: to protect individuals. All I did was publish Facebook's own GPL download script to github, and it got DMCA'd. If we don't push back on that kind of behavior now, companies will get used to the idea that they control "their" model –– even when their model is anything but theirs.
- hedgehog 3y ago
  I think the DMCA being a massive overreach is a separate issue from whether weights should be eligible for copyright. This is a complicated legal area and I'm very much not a lawyer so let me just stick to some examples that guide my thinking: - Grammarly. Clear value prop, if weights can't be adequately protected then that's a significant headwind against doing processing on the client. - Adobe Firefly. Could run locally, they understand the technical challenges well, same headwind. - GitHub Copilot. Same. Copyright protection is probably not a single deciding issue in their product strategy but all of those are use cases that would for most users be better run locally as hardware can support that and are not going to because it's too much of a risk. Better to limit distribution and protect as trade secret. The most powerful force for openness I see has nothing to do with copyright eligibility and everything to do with companies wanting to showcase their research arms to build brand and support recruiting. That leads me to believe it's probably better for models to be eligible for copyright and considered derivatives of all of the constituent training data. In some ways the better parallel is sampling in the music industry. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
- tensor 3y ago
  If an individual trains a model on their own data to embody their own skills and behaviour, so that they can then sell/rent that model out to work on their behalf, well in that scenario not being able to treat the weights as intellectual property (copyright or otherwise controllable by a license), would be a huge violation and detrimental to that individual. I think it would be a shame to try to build legislation around the notion of the sass melting pot application of machine learning and in the process destroy all sorts of other use cases.
  - js8 3y ago
    > If an individual trains a model on their own data to embody their own skills and behaviour, so that they can then sell/rent that model out to work on their behalf No, because we already do not treat all work as copyrightable. A plumber doesn't get copyright on his piping job. It has to be original enough. So while your own skill might be original enough to warrant copyright, distilling it into a model might not.

idiotsecant 3y ago

Is it useful to protect weights with copyright? What if I download your weights and retrain them for 5 seconds, changing each weight .0000001%? How much change is a new product? What if I change a single weight?

hedgehog 3y ago
Like the parallel scenarios of taking a book and changing a few words, slapping a new logo on someone else's app, or stylizing a photo with a filter, those are questions that will be answered in court if people can't come to an agreement on their own.

sillysaurusx 3y ago

This is true, and it's why I hesitated to file legal action. My goal was to benefit hackers. If the outcome causes problems for people who are just trying to share their work, I'd be upset. Ultimately what convinced me to proceed is that there are immense forces pressuring ML models to become SaaS companies. It's very difficult to offer an ML model for extended periods without being a company. E.g. https://6b.eleuther.ai/ https://6b.eleuther.ai/ is down. Eleuther failing illustrates just how hard it is –– we were all working as hard as we could to design something that would last a long time, and a long time turned out to be two short years. Contrast that with other kinds of hacking (e.g. webdev, gamedev, hardware...) where the end result lasts basically forever. So if ML models aren't copyrightable, I think it'll hurt companies a lot more than individuals. In fact the goal is the other way around: to protect individuals. All I did was publish Facebook's own GPL download script to github, and it got DMCA'd. If we don't push back on that kind of behavior now, companies will get used to the idea that they control "their" model –– even when their model is anything but theirs.

hedgehog 3y ago
I think the DMCA being a massive overreach is a separate issue from whether weights should be eligible for copyright. This is a complicated legal area and I'm very much not a lawyer so let me just stick to some examples that guide my thinking: - Grammarly. Clear value prop, if weights can't be adequately protected then that's a significant headwind against doing processing on the client. - Adobe Firefly. Could run locally, they understand the technical challenges well, same headwind. - GitHub Copilot. Same. Copyright protection is probably not a single deciding issue in their product strategy but all of those are use cases that would for most users be better run locally as hardware can support that and are not going to because it's too much of a risk. Better to limit distribution and protect as trade secret. The most powerful force for openness I see has nothing to do with copyright eligibility and everything to do with companies wanting to showcase their research arms to build brand and support recruiting. That leads me to believe it's probably better for models to be eligible for copyright and considered derivatives of all of the constituent training data. In some ways the better parallel is sampling in the music industry. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
tensor 3y ago
If an individual trains a model on their own data to embody their own skills and behaviour, so that they can then sell/rent that model out to work on their behalf, well in that scenario not being able to treat the weights as intellectual property (copyright or otherwise controllable by a license), would be a huge violation and detrimental to that individual. I think it would be a shame to try to build legislation around the notion of the sass melting pot application of machine learning and in the process destroy all sorts of other use cases.
- js8 3y ago
  > If an individual trains a model on their own data to embody their own skills and behaviour, so that they can then sell/rent that model out to work on their behalf No, because we already do not treat all work as copyrightable. A plumber doesn't get copyright on his piping job. It has to be original enough. So while your own skill might be original enough to warrant copyright, distilling it into a model might not.