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Aside from copyright, this raises anti-trust issues. Courts generally uphold provisions against reverse-engineering (as protecting internal, proprietary knowle
by w10-1 3y ago
Aside from copyright, this raises anti-trust issues.
Courts generally uphold provisions against reverse-engineering (as protecting internal, proprietary knowledge) but are more welcoming to copying interfaces (as encouraging market substitutes). So one question would be whether OpenAI can restrict use of the output of their tool in this manner, since the output itself is manifestly open (to the customer). That seems novel. The only analogy I know of is database licensing that prevents customers from publishing comparisons, which seems anti-competitive.
Anti-trust policy is motivated mainly in mature markets, where one player has fairly (by hypothesis) grown to dominate. The law and courts apply special scrutiny to identify ordinarily-acceptable market practices that extend the market power of the dominant player.
But is it the same analysis in a growing market? It seems like even if OpenAI (or especially, OpenAI+Microsoft) is dominant, if the market is growing quickly, the concern might be relaxed since the dominance is uncertain. Conversely, if the market is particularly susceptible to capture, early leaders might warrant heightened scrutiny.
But aside from monopoly's first-order effect on reducing competition, the second-order effect is to reduce investments in competitors, which has anti-competitive effects. That concern could be highest in the early stages of a market.
Are there any good lawyer blogs on point?
- avsteele 3y agoThe terms against using the output to develop a competing product seem the same as reverse engineering to me. Competitors can't get OpenAI's model weights but use its outputs to produce a functionally similar model. It's like if you had a competitor's engine and couldn't open it up but could still see the outputs: torque, rpm, ..., and could control the inputs: fuel intake, air mixture, etc... Then you make an engine by inferring back from these measurements. Wouldn't that be reverse engineering?
- matei88 3y agoNo, it will be an engine that produces the same output if given the same input. It's like saying Google reverse engineered Yahoo and built a search engine
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chongli 3y agoThe engine analogy is not a great one. Those inputs and outputs are very crude information. The actual design of an engine is quite complicated and subject to very close tolerances. Your analogy is like going to an airport and looking at departure and arrival times as well as the flight path and then “reverse engineering” an aircraft from that. The chances are very low that you produce anything remotely resembling the aircraft you’re trying to reverse engineer. Same goes for the engine.
- avsteele 3y agoOK. In the case at hand we are dealing with a mathematical function. In->Out is all there is. Back-estimating a mathematical function by sampling is as close to reverse engineering as anything is.
- layer8 3y agoI don’t think it counts as reverse engineering if you only treat it as a black box. In addition, this is much more akin to data exfiltration than to copying an engineered mechanism. The training algorithm could count as an engineered mechanism, but that’s not what is being copied.