this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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It won't really do anything though. The model itself is whatever. The training tools, data and resulting generations of weights are where the meat is. Unless you can prove they are using unlicensed data from those three pieces, open sourcing it is kind of moot.
What we need is legislation to stop it from happening in perpetuity. Maybe just ONE civil case win to make them think twice about training on unlicensed data, but they'll drag that out for years until people go broke fighting, or stop giving a shit.
They pulled a very public and out in the open data heist and got away with it. Stopping it from continuously happening is the only way to win here.
But wouldn't that mean making it open source, then it not functioning properly without the data while open, would prove that it is using a huge amount of unlicensed data?
Probably not "burden of proof in a court of law" prove though.
Making it open source doesn't change how it works. It doesn't need the data after it's been trained. Most of these AIs are just figuring out patterns to look for in the new data it comes across.
So you're saying the data wouldn't exist anywhere in the source code, but it would still be able to answer questions based on the data it has previously seen?
That is how LLM works, they don't store the data as data, but as weight values.
So then why, if it were all open sourced, including the weights, would the AI be worthless? Surely having an identical but open source version, that would strip profitability from the original paid product.
It wouldn't be. It would still work. It just wouldn't be exclusively available to the group that created it-any competitive advantage is lost.
But all of this ignores the real issue - you're not really punishing the use of unauthorized data. Those who owned that data are still harmed by this.
It does discourages the use of unauthorised data. If stealing doesn't give you competitive advantage, it's not really worth the risk and cost of stealing it in the first place.
If you can still use it after you stole it, as opposed to not being able to use it at all... Then it does give you an incentive
If you did all the work and potentially criminal collection of data, but everyone else gets the benefit as well, that is not an incentive. You underestimate how selfish corporations can be.
OpenAI wouldn't stay at the forefront of LLM if every competitor gets to use the model they spent money on training.
Most AI are not built to answer questions. They're designed to act as some kind of detection/filter heuristic to identify specific things about an input that leads to a desired output.