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No. OpenAI is suspected to be worth over $150B. They can absolutely afford to pay people for data. Edit: People commenting need to understand that $150B is the

by fny 2y ago

No. OpenAI is suspected to be worth over $150B. They can absolutely afford to pay people for data. Edit: People commenting need to understand that $150B is the discounted value of future revenues. So... yes they can pay out... yes they will be worth less... and yes that's fair to the people who created the information. I can't believe there are so many apologists on HN for what amounts to vacuuming up peoples data for financial gain.

suby 2y ago
OpenAI is not profitable, and to achieve what they have achieved they had to scrape basically the entire internet. I don't have a hard time believing that OpenAI could not exist if they had to respect copyright. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-this-year-on-3point7-billion-in-revenue.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...
- jpalawaga 2y ago
  technically open ai has respected copyright, except in the (few) instances they produce non-fair-use amounts of copyrighted material. dmca does not cover scraping.
- noitpmeder 2y ago
  That's a good thing! If a company cannot raise to fame unless they violate laws, it should not have been there. There is plenty of public domain text that could have taught a LLM English.
  - suby 2y ago
    I'm not convinced that the economic harm to content creators is greater than the productivity gains and accessibility of knowledge for users (relative to how competent it would be if trained just on public domain text). Personally, I derive immense value from ChatGPT / Claude. It's borderline life changing for me. As time goes on, I imagine that it'll increasingly be the case that these LLM's will displace people out of their jobs / careers. I don't know whether the harm done will be greater than the benefit to society. I'm sure the answer will depend on who it is that you ask. > That's a good thing! If a company cannot raise to fame unless they violate laws, it should not have been there. Obviously given what I wrote above, I'd consider it a bad thing if LLM tech severely regressed due to copyright law. Laws are not inherently good or bad. I think you can make a good argument that this tech will be a net negative for society, but I don't think it's valid to do so just on the basis that it is breaking the law as it is today.
    - DrillShopper 2y ago
      > I'm not convinced that the economic harm to content creators is greater than the productivity gains and accessibility of knowledge for users (relative to how competent it would be if trained just on public domain text). Good thing whether or not something is a copyright violation doesn't depend on if you can make more money with someone else's work than they can.
      - suby 2y ago
        I understand the anger about large tech companies using others work without compensation, especially when both they and their users benefit financially. But this goes beyond economcis. LLM tech could accelerate advances in medicine and technology. I strongly believe that we're going to see societal benefits in education, healthcare, especially mental health support thanks to this tech. I also think that someone making money off LLM's is a separate question from whether or not the original creator has been harmed. I think many creators are going to benefit from better tools, and we'll likely see new forms of creation become viable. We already recognize that certain uses of intellectual property should be permitted for societies benefit. We have fair use doctrine, patent compulsory licensing for public health, research exmpetions, and public libraries. Transformative use is also permitted, and LLMs are inherently transformative. Look at the volume of data that they ingest compared to the final size of a trained model, and how fundamentally different the output format is from the input data. Human progress has always built upon existing knowledge. Consider how both Darwin and Wallace independently developed evolution theory at roughly the same time -- not from isolation, but from building on the intellectual foundation of their era. Everything in human culture builds on what came before. That all being said, I'm also sure that this tech is going to negative impact people too. Like I said in the other reply, whether or not this tech is good or bad will depend on who you ask. I just think that we should weigh these costs against the potential benefits to society as a whole rather than simply preserving existing systems, or blindly following the law as if the law is inherently just or good. Copyright law was made before this tech was even imagined, and it seems fair to now evaluate whether the current copyright regime makes sense if it turns out that it'd keep us in some local maximum.
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    > unless they violate laws *unless they violate country laws. Which means openAI or its alternative could survive in China but not in US. The question is that if we are fine with it?
jsheard 2y ago
The OpenAI that is assumed to keep being able to harvest every form of IP without compensation is valued at $150B, an OpenAI that has to pay for data would be worth significantly less. They're currently not even expecting to turn a profit until 2029, and that's without paying for data. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-reveals-openais-44-billion-145334935.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-reveals-openais-44-bil...
mrweasel 2y ago
That's not real money tough. You need actual cash on hand to pay for stuff, OpenAI only have the money they've been given by investors. I suspect that many of the investors wouldn't have been so keen if they knew that OpenAI would need an additional couple of billions a year to pay for data.
- __loam 2y ago
  That's too bad that your business isn't viable without the largest single violation of copyright of all time.
nickpsecurity 2y ago
That doesn’t mean they have $150B to hand over. What you can cite is the $10 billion they got from Microsoft. I’m sure they could use a chunk of that to buy competitive I.P. for both companies to use for training. They can also pay experts to create it. They could even sell that to others for use in smaller models to finance creating or buying even more I.P. for their models.
wvenable 2y ago
[flagged]
- mongol 2y ago
  The process of reading it into their training data is a way of copying it. It exists somewhere and they need to copy it in order to ingest it.
  - wvenable 2y ago
    By that logic you're violating copyright by using a web browser.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      >By that logic you're violating copyright by using a web browser. You would be except for the fact that publishing stuff on the web gives people an implicit license to download it for the purposes of viewing it.
      - Timwi 2y ago
        Not sure about US or other jurisdictions, but that's not how any of this works in Germany. In Germany downloading anything from anywhere (even a movie) is never illegal and does not require a license. What's illegal is publishing/disseminating copyrighted content without authorization. BitTorrenting a movie is illegal because you're distributing it to other torrenters. Streaming a movie on your website is illegal because it's public. You can be held liable for using a photo from the web to illustrate your eBay auction, not because you downloaded it but because you republished it. OpenAI (and Google and everyone else) is creating a publicly-accessible system that produces output that could be derived from copyrighted material.
        Tomte 2y ago
        > In Germany […] That‘s confidently and completely wrong.

by fny 2y ago

suby 2y ago

OpenAI is not profitable, and to achieve what they have achieved they had to scrape basically the entire internet. I don't have a hard time believing that OpenAI could not exist if they had to respect copyright. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-this-year-on-3point7-billion-in-revenue.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...

jpalawaga 2y ago
technically open ai has respected copyright, except in the (few) instances they produce non-fair-use amounts of copyrighted material. dmca does not cover scraping.
noitpmeder 2y ago
That's a good thing! If a company cannot raise to fame unless they violate laws, it should not have been there. There is plenty of public domain text that could have taught a LLM English.
- suby 2y ago
  I'm not convinced that the economic harm to content creators is greater than the productivity gains and accessibility of knowledge for users (relative to how competent it would be if trained just on public domain text). Personally, I derive immense value from ChatGPT / Claude. It's borderline life changing for me. As time goes on, I imagine that it'll increasingly be the case that these LLM's will displace people out of their jobs / careers. I don't know whether the harm done will be greater than the benefit to society. I'm sure the answer will depend on who it is that you ask. > That's a good thing! If a company cannot raise to fame unless they violate laws, it should not have been there. Obviously given what I wrote above, I'd consider it a bad thing if LLM tech severely regressed due to copyright law. Laws are not inherently good or bad. I think you can make a good argument that this tech will be a net negative for society, but I don't think it's valid to do so just on the basis that it is breaking the law as it is today.
  - DrillShopper 2y ago
    > I'm not convinced that the economic harm to content creators is greater than the productivity gains and accessibility of knowledge for users (relative to how competent it would be if trained just on public domain text). Good thing whether or not something is a copyright violation doesn't depend on if you can make more money with someone else's work than they can.
    - suby 2y ago
      I understand the anger about large tech companies using others work without compensation, especially when both they and their users benefit financially. But this goes beyond economcis. LLM tech could accelerate advances in medicine and technology. I strongly believe that we're going to see societal benefits in education, healthcare, especially mental health support thanks to this tech. I also think that someone making money off LLM's is a separate question from whether or not the original creator has been harmed. I think many creators are going to benefit from better tools, and we'll likely see new forms of creation become viable. We already recognize that certain uses of intellectual property should be permitted for societies benefit. We have fair use doctrine, patent compulsory licensing for public health, research exmpetions, and public libraries. Transformative use is also permitted, and LLMs are inherently transformative. Look at the volume of data that they ingest compared to the final size of a trained model, and how fundamentally different the output format is from the input data. Human progress has always built upon existing knowledge. Consider how both Darwin and Wallace independently developed evolution theory at roughly the same time -- not from isolation, but from building on the intellectual foundation of their era. Everything in human culture builds on what came before. That all being said, I'm also sure that this tech is going to negative impact people too. Like I said in the other reply, whether or not this tech is good or bad will depend on who you ask. I just think that we should weigh these costs against the potential benefits to society as a whole rather than simply preserving existing systems, or blindly following the law as if the law is inherently just or good. Copyright law was made before this tech was even imagined, and it seems fair to now evaluate whether the current copyright regime makes sense if it turns out that it'd keep us in some local maximum.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  > unless they violate laws *unless they violate country laws. Which means openAI or its alternative could survive in China but not in US. The question is that if we are fine with it?

jsheard 2y ago

The OpenAI that is assumed to keep being able to harvest every form of IP without compensation is valued at $150B, an OpenAI that has to pay for data would be worth significantly less. They're currently not even expecting to turn a profit until 2029, and that's without paying for data. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-reveals-openais-44-billion-145334935.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-reveals-openais-44-bil...

mrweasel 2y ago

That's not real money tough. You need actual cash on hand to pay for stuff, OpenAI only have the money they've been given by investors. I suspect that many of the investors wouldn't have been so keen if they knew that OpenAI would need an additional couple of billions a year to pay for data.

__loam 2y ago
That's too bad that your business isn't viable without the largest single violation of copyright of all time.

nickpsecurity 2y ago

That doesn’t mean they have $150B to hand over. What you can cite is the $10 billion they got from Microsoft. I’m sure they could use a chunk of that to buy competitive I.P. for both companies to use for training. They can also pay experts to create it. They could even sell that to others for use in smaller models to finance creating or buying even more I.P. for their models.

wvenable 2y ago

[flagged]

mongol 2y ago
The process of reading it into their training data is a way of copying it. It exists somewhere and they need to copy it in order to ingest it.
- wvenable 2y ago
  By that logic you're violating copyright by using a web browser.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >By that logic you're violating copyright by using a web browser. You would be except for the fact that publishing stuff on the web gives people an implicit license to download it for the purposes of viewing it.
    - Timwi 2y ago
      Not sure about US or other jurisdictions, but that's not how any of this works in Germany. In Germany downloading anything from anywhere (even a movie) is never illegal and does not require a license. What's illegal is publishing/disseminating copyrighted content without authorization. BitTorrenting a movie is illegal because you're distributing it to other torrenters. Streaming a movie on your website is illegal because it's public. You can be held liable for using a photo from the web to illustrate your eBay auction, not because you downloaded it but because you republished it. OpenAI (and Google and everyone else) is creating a publicly-accessible system that produces output that could be derived from copyrighted material.
      - Tomte 2y ago
        > In Germany […] That‘s confidently and completely wrong.