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It's not mentioned because it's neither relevant to this article or true at all? As far as courts are concerned right now, LLMs are simply tools and all existin

It's not mentioned because it's neither relevant to this article or true at all? As far as courts are concerned right now, LLMs are simply tools and all existing rules and procedures around copyright still apply: a human is liable for it's use, only the work and skill of a human is copyrightable, etc. Nor are LLMs novel in any way when it comes to copyright violation. Microsoft is already rich enough they could ask developer(s) to reproduce a GPL code base but slightly different and then make an argument of coincidental, parallel thought. Or just pinky promise "we totally didn't steal this." Heck, it'd just be easier to copy and paste without license headers and then just run some basic human-readable obfuscation. Furthermore, AI still isn't even close to being able to pull this off for even remotely complex projects. The context sizes are too small, the models aren't sophisticated enough, etc. They save time as an assistant, but novel output is extremely finicky and prone to errors. Getting a model that can be trusted to do what you're saying would be approaching AGI, in which case the economic ramifications are far more concerning than those on OSS. Finally, how exactly would this "disassemble" OSS? The GPL has been violated for forever, especially behind closed doors. If this would kill it, the GPL is already dead and capitalism killed it. After all, if Microsoft - a company with a revenue stream larger than countries - decides to steal from virtually any OSS projext and the developers - a gaggle of volunteers with few liquid assets - try to take them to court, they're about to engage in a battle of attrition with legal fees. The legal system notoriously favors the rich, which is a far greater threat.

hnfong 3y ago
> The context sizes are too small, the models aren't sophisticated enough, etc. Yeah, I wonder what GPL-ed code is actually infringed upon. I vividly remember the time Oracle claimed Google infringed their copyrights because they copied a couple small functions, and the tech community just laughed saying the functions were too trivial. (Mind you, Java was licensed under the GPL.) People harping that the GPL is somehow more affected by LLMs is kind of misguided. If there is copyright infringement, then almost all other licenses would be infringed too, since the vast majority of OSS licenses require keeping the copyright notice at the very least. And the enmity towards Microsoft, whose "fault" is just having acquired shares of OpenAI, as opposed to almost every other Big Tech company who also released LLMs (and obviously injested a lot of github code), feels like the early 2000s again.

hnfong 3y ago

> The context sizes are too small, the models aren't sophisticated enough, etc. Yeah, I wonder what GPL-ed code is actually infringed upon. I vividly remember the time Oracle claimed Google infringed their copyrights because they copied a couple small functions, and the tech community just laughed saying the functions were too trivial. (Mind you, Java was licensed under the GPL.) People harping that the GPL is somehow more affected by LLMs is kind of misguided. If there is copyright infringement, then almost all other licenses would be infringed too, since the vast majority of OSS licenses require keeping the copyright notice at the very least. And the enmity towards Microsoft, whose "fault" is just having acquired shares of OpenAI, as opposed to almost every other Big Tech company who also released LLMs (and obviously injested a lot of github code), feels like the early 2000s again.