5 ms·

As I've said several times, the corpus is key: LLMs thus far "read" most anything, but should instead have well-curated corpora. "Garbage In, Garbage Out!(GIGO

As I've said several times, the corpus is key: LLMs thus far "read" most anything, but should instead have well-curated corpora. "Garbage In, Garbage Out!(GIGO)" is the saying. While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere. Leave Harry Potter for a different "Harry Potter LLM". Train scientific LLMs to the level of a good early 20th century English major and then use science texts and research papers for the remainder.

alephnerd 1y ago
> While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere It has copyright implications - if Claude can recollect 42% of a copyrighted product without attribution or royalties, how did Anthropic train it? > Train scientific LLMs to the level of a good early 20th century English major and then use science texts and research papers for the remainder Plenty of in-stealth companies approaching LLMs via this approach ;) For those of us who studied the natural sciences and CS in the 2000s and early 2010s, there was a bit of a trend where certain PIs would simply translate German and Russian papers from the early-to-mid 20th century and attribute them to themselves in fields like CS (especially in what became ML).
- weird-eye-issue 1y ago
  Why are you talking about Claude and Anthropic?
  - cshimmin 1y ago
    It’s not unreasonable to suspect they are doing the same. The article starts with a description of a lawsuit NY Times brought against OpenAI for similar reasons. The big difference is that research presented here is only possible with open weight models. OAI and Anthropic don’t make the base models available, so it’s easier to hide the fact that you’ve used copyrighted material by instruction post-training. And I’m not sure you can get the logprobs for specific tokens from their APIs either (which is what the researchers did to make the figures and come up with a concrete number like 42%)
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    Good call! I brain farted and wrote Claude/Anthropic instead of Meta/Llama.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  So if I memorized Harry Potter the physical encoding which definitely exists in my brain is a copyright violation?
  - teaearlgraycold 1y ago
    I think humans get a special exception in cases like this
    - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
      No they don't. Commercial intent is what is prosecuted in IP law.
  - shrewduser 1y ago
    maybe if you re wrote it from memory.
  - lithiumii 1y ago
    You are not selling or distributing copies of your brain.
  - harry8 1y ago
    If you perform it from memory in public without paying royalties then yes, yes it is. Should it be? Different question.
  - dvt 1y ago
    > the physical encoding which definitely exists in my brain is a copyright violation First of all, we don't really know how the brain works. I get that you're being a snarky physicalist, but there's plenty of substance dualists, panpsychsts, etc. out there. So, some might say, this is a reductive description of what happens in our brains. Second of all, yes, if you tried to publish Harry Potter (even if it was from memory), you would get in trouble for copyright violation.
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
- epgui 1y ago
  > It has copyright implications - if Claude can recollect 42% of a copyrighted product without attribution or royalties, how did Anthropic train it? Personally I’m assuming the worst. That being said, Harry Potter was such a big cultural phenomenon that I wonder to what degree might one actually be able to reconstruct the books based solely on publicly accessible derivative material.
esafak 1y ago
That's got nothing to do with it. It's all about copyright. Can it reproduce its training data verbatim? If so, Meta is in hot water.
- strangescript 1y ago
  I read harry potter, and you ask me about a page, and I can recite it verbatim, did I just commit copyright infringement?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - __loam 1y ago
    This is an extremely common strawman argument. We're not discussing human memory.
  - bitmasher9 1y ago
    I pay for a service. The service recites a novel to me. The service would need permission to do this or it is copyright infringement.
  - lucianbr 1y ago
    Are you selling your ability to recite stuff? Then certainly.
    - strangescript 1y ago
      there are plenty of open source LLMs trained on harry potter, is that fine?
      - sumeno 1y ago
        No
- giardini 1y ago
  But if it's corpora do NOT include the Harry Potter books then Meta is NOT in hot water,! So take the Harry Potter books out of the corpora. What is lost? Nothing IMO useful other than the ability to discuss Harry Potter books. BFD.
Jap2-0 1y ago
> While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere To address this point, and not other concerns: the benefits would be (1) pop culture knowledge and (2) having a variety of styles of edited/reasonably good-quality prose.

alephnerd 1y ago

> While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere It has copyright implications - if Claude can recollect 42% of a copyrighted product without attribution or royalties, how did Anthropic train it? > Train scientific LLMs to the level of a good early 20th century English major and then use science texts and research papers for the remainder Plenty of in-stealth companies approaching LLMs via this approach ;) For those of us who studied the natural sciences and CS in the 2000s and early 2010s, there was a bit of a trend where certain PIs would simply translate German and Russian papers from the early-to-mid 20th century and attribute them to themselves in fields like CS (especially in what became ML).

weird-eye-issue 1y ago
Why are you talking about Claude and Anthropic?
- cshimmin 1y ago
  It’s not unreasonable to suspect they are doing the same. The article starts with a description of a lawsuit NY Times brought against OpenAI for similar reasons. The big difference is that research presented here is only possible with open weight models. OAI and Anthropic don’t make the base models available, so it’s easier to hide the fact that you’ve used copyrighted material by instruction post-training. And I’m not sure you can get the logprobs for specific tokens from their APIs either (which is what the researchers did to make the figures and come up with a concrete number like 42%)
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Good call! I brain farted and wrote Claude/Anthropic instead of Meta/Llama.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
So if I memorized Harry Potter the physical encoding which definitely exists in my brain is a copyright violation?
- teaearlgraycold 1y ago
  I think humans get a special exception in cases like this
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    No they don't. Commercial intent is what is prosecuted in IP law.
- shrewduser 1y ago
  maybe if you re wrote it from memory.
- lithiumii 1y ago
  You are not selling or distributing copies of your brain.
- harry8 1y ago
  If you perform it from memory in public without paying royalties then yes, yes it is. Should it be? Different question.
- dvt 1y ago
  > the physical encoding which definitely exists in my brain is a copyright violation First of all, we don't really know how the brain works. I get that you're being a snarky physicalist, but there's plenty of substance dualists, panpsychsts, etc. out there. So, some might say, this is a reductive description of what happens in our brains. Second of all, yes, if you tried to publish Harry Potter (even if it was from memory), you would get in trouble for copyright violation.
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
epgui 1y ago
> It has copyright implications - if Claude can recollect 42% of a copyrighted product without attribution or royalties, how did Anthropic train it? Personally I’m assuming the worst. That being said, Harry Potter was such a big cultural phenomenon that I wonder to what degree might one actually be able to reconstruct the books based solely on publicly accessible derivative material.

esafak 1y ago

That's got nothing to do with it. It's all about copyright. Can it reproduce its training data verbatim? If so, Meta is in hot water.

strangescript 1y ago
I read harry potter, and you ask me about a page, and I can recite it verbatim, did I just commit copyright infringement?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- __loam 1y ago
  This is an extremely common strawman argument. We're not discussing human memory.
- bitmasher9 1y ago
  I pay for a service. The service recites a novel to me. The service would need permission to do this or it is copyright infringement.
- lucianbr 1y ago
  Are you selling your ability to recite stuff? Then certainly.
  - strangescript 1y ago
    there are plenty of open source LLMs trained on harry potter, is that fine?
    - sumeno 1y ago
      No
giardini 1y ago
But if it's corpora do NOT include the Harry Potter books then Meta is NOT in hot water,! So take the Harry Potter books out of the corpora. What is lost? Nothing IMO useful other than the ability to discuss Harry Potter books. BFD.

Jap2-0 1y ago

> While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere To address this point, and not other concerns: the benefits would be (1) pop culture knowledge and (2) having a variety of styles of edited/reasonably good-quality prose.