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Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?
by tyingq 3y ago
Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?
- jfghi 3y agoCopilot, I want to build a spreadsheet application and a database engine.
- tyingq 3y agoAh, so for copyright reasons.
- hangsi 3y agoThis isn't really copyright - more the microeconomics of losing market share/control. Specifically, I think they are less concerned with (say) specific Excel code leaking than with the knock on effects of a cheap perfect substitute.
- norir 3y ago> Specifically, I think they are less concerned with (say) specific Excel code leaking than with the knock on effects of a cheap perfect substitute. Is there any evidence that an LLM could actually generate a perfect substitute for excel solely through prompting if only the excel source was in the training data? I hypothesize that designing a prompt for an LLM that captures all of Excel's properties would be comparable in difficulty to reimplementing the functionality without an LLM.
- heavyset_go 3y agoIt's very telling that they train on millions of developers' code, but won't use their source. If it won't violate IP rights, there shouldn't be a problem. It suggests those whose code is trained upon have something to lose if the trained models are used by others.
- judge2020 3y agoIt's likely a clash between some high level managers, and they just haven't pushed the issue to the point that Satya has to make a decision for the org as a whole.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's pure speculation. Whatever the reasons are they currently don't and that's a tell.
- blibble 3y agoseems likely to hurt the product's adoption if was trained on Microsoft's source code who would want the genius of Teams, sharepoint, onedrive or powerbi in their product?
- manicennui 3y agoThe many large companies with equally crappy code who just care about cutting costs and have fallen for the "AI" fad?
- paxys 3y agoClosed source != source available. If you put your code out there in the world it is fair game for training, because you can't stop someone from reading and understanding it. Microsoft chooses not to make its proprietary code public, hence it is not available for training.
- tyingq 3y agoThey have the ability to feed their closed source to Copilot for training without exposing the source to everyone directly, given the relationship. They choose not to.
- paxys 3y agoThey also have the ability to install malware on Windows and use everyone's source code for training, but choose not to, because private code is private. Their own code isn't an exception. Microsoft code in Github repos is used for training, just like the rest.
- kube-system 3y agoWhy would MS need to worry about their private code being fed into their own private AI model?
- paxys 3y agoBecause... it's private code. Can the company be 100% certain there are no passwords, DB keys, other company secrets in it? Can they be certain there's no personal employee data? Internal product names? A hundred other similar concerns with proprietary IP? Regardless of how the LLM transforms it the individual bits of data are still there. On the other hand if the repo is already public on Github then exposing it via an LLM is not introducing any new security risk.
- tyingq 3y agoIf they believe their own assertations, like: - that it doesn't output training data verbatim - the product is very transformative, only "learning" from training data - There are no copyright infringements because of these two above Well, then there's really no reason not to throw their own private code on the pile.
- fooker 3y agoI bet they have this for internal users.
- xeromal 3y agoHaving seen some very secret and proprietary Microsoft code, you don't want to use it anyways. lol
- JB_Dev 3y agoAware
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tzs 3y agoOne possible reason is trade secrets in their source. There's generally more to source code than just what actually ends up in binary releases and that might contain such secrets.