I just want consistent and fair rules.

I'm all for abolishing copyright, for everyone. Let the knowledge be free and widely shared.

But until that is the case and people running super useful services like libgen have to keep hiding then I also want all the LLM corpos to be subject to the same legal penalties.

Exactly this. If we have to live under a stifling copyright regime, then at least it should be applied evenly. It's fundamentally unfair to have one set of laws (at least as enforced in practice) for the rich and powerful and another set for everyone else.

This is the entire point of existence for the GPL. Weaponize copyright. LLMs have conveniently been able to circumvent this somehow, and we have no answer for it.

Because some people keep asserting that LLM’s “don’t count as stealing” and “how come search links are on but got reciting paywalled NYT articles on demand is bad??” Without so much as a hint of irony.

LLM tech is pretty cool.

Would be a lot cooler if its existence wasn’t predicted on the wholesale theft of everyone’s stuff, immediately followed by denial of theft, poisoning the well, and massively profiting off it.

You are singling out accidental replication and forgetting it was triggered with fragments from the original material. Almost all LLM outputs are original - both because they use randomness to sample, and because they have user prompt conditioning.

And LLMs are really a bad choice for infringement. They are slow, costly and unreliable at replicating any large piece of text compared to illegal copying. There is no space to perfectly memorize the majority of its training set. A 10B models is trained on 10T tokens, no space for more than 0.1% to be properly memorized.

I see this overreaction as an attempt to strengthen copyright, a kind of nimby-ism where existing authors cut the ladder to the next generation by walling off abstract ideas and making it more probably to get sued for accidental similarities.

>Because some people keep asserting that LLM’s “don’t count as stealing”

People who confidently assert either opinion in this regard are wrong. The lawsuits are still pending. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on the OpenAI side. Even if they don't win outright, they'll probably carve out enough exemptions and mandatory licensing deals to be comfortable.

Pirate Bay wasn't selling access to the torrents trying to make a massive profit.

True, though paid language models are probably just a blip in history. Free weight language models are only ~12 months behind and have massive resources thanks to Meta.

That profit will be squeezed to zero over the long term if Zuck maintains his current strategy.

> Free weight language models are only ~12 months

That's not true anymore, Meta isn't behind OpenAI

That can change on a dime though, if Zuck decides it's in his financial interest to change course. If Facebook stops spending billions of dollars on open models who is going to step in and fill that gap?

That depends on when Meta stops. The longer Meta keeps releasing free models, the more capabilities are made permanently unprofitable. For example, Llama 3.1 is already good enough for translation or as a writing assistant.

If Meta stopped now, there would still be profit in the market, but if they keep releasing Llamas for the next 5+ years then OpenAI et al will be fighting for scraps. Not everybody needs a model that can prove theorems.

Hackers are against corporations. If breaking the copyright laws make corps bigger, more powerful and more corrupt, hackers will be against it rightfully so. Abolishing copyright is different than abusing it, we should abolish it.

I'm not sure if you're being disingenuous, or if you genuinely don't understand the difference.

Pirate Bay: largely facilitating the theft of material from large corporations by normal people, for generally personal use.

LLM training: theft of material from literally _everyone_, for the purposes of corporate profit (or, well, heh, intended profit; of course all LLM-based enterprises are currently massively loss-making, and may remain so forever).

> (or, well, heh, intended profit; of course all LLM-based enterprises are currently massively loss-making, and may remain so forever)

This undermines your own point.

Also, open source models exist.

It’s the same picture.

It’s because it now affects hackers and before it only affected musicians.

It affects hackers how? By giving them cool technology at below cost? Or is it further democratizing knowledge? Or maybe it's the inflated software eng salaries due to AI hype?

Help me understand the negative effect of AI and LLMs on hackers.

It's trendy caste-signaling to hate on AI which endangers white-collar jobs and creative work the way machinery endangered blue-collar jobs and productive work (ie. not at all in the long run, but in the short term you will face some changes).

I've never actually used an LLM though - I just don't have any use for such a thing. All my writing and programming are done for fun and automation would take that away.

Nonsense. Computer piracy started with sharing software. Music piracy (on computers) started in the late 90s when computers were powerful enough to store and play music.

Bill Gates' infamous letter was sent in 1976[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

The common denominator is big corporations trying to screw us over for profit, using their immense wealth as a battering ram.

So, capitalism.

It's taboo to criticize that though.

> It's taboo to criticize that though

In what world is this taboo? That critique comes back in at least half the HN threads about AI.

Watch any non-technical video about AI on Youtube and it will mention people being worried of the power of mega-corporations.

Your take is about as taboo as wearing a Che Guevara tshirt.

In the mainstream media - the default media diet of most americans.

All sorts of taboo stuff gets said on hacker news. It's not exactly a cultural bellwether that something is allowed to be said here.

Wearing a che guevara t shirt is similarly "allowed", but the last article about him in the new york times is fawning administration for his assassin.

Criticism of capitalism is taboo.

> It's taboo to criticize that though.

It's not, that's playing the victim. There are hundreds or thousands of posts daily all over HN criticising capitalism. And most seem upvoted, not downvoted.

Don't even get me started on reddit.

i find quite ironic whenever i see a highly upvoted comment here complaining about capitalism because for sure i don't see yc existing in any other type of economy.

This only holds if your thinking on the subject of economic systems is only as deep as choosing your character’s class in an RPG game. There’s no need for us to make every last industry a state owned enterprise and no one who’s spent longer than an hour or so contemplating such things thinks that way. I have no desire to not have a variety of companies producing things like cars, electronics, software, video games, just to name a few. Competition does drive innovation, that is still true, and having such firms vying for a limited amount of resources dispatched by individuals makes a lot of sense. Markets have their place.

However markets also have limits. A power company competing for your business is largely a farce, since the power lines to your home will not change. A cable company in America is almost certainly a functional monopoly, and that fact is reflected in their quality of service. Infrastructure of all sorts makes for piss-put markets because true competition is all but impossible, and even if it does kind of work, it’s inefficient. A customer must become knowledgeable in some way to have a ghost of a clue what they’re buying, or trust entirely dubious information from marketing. And, even if somehow everything is working up to this point, corporations are, above all, cost cutters and if you put one in charge of an area where it feels as though customers have few if any choices and the friction to change is high, they will immediately begin degrading their quality of services to save money in the budget.

And this is only from first principles, we have so many other things that could be discussed from mass market manipulation to the generous subsidies of a stunning variety that basically every business at scale enjoys to the rapacious compensation schemes that have become entirely too commonplace in the executive room, etc etc etc.

To put it short: I have no issue at all with capitalism operating in non-essential to life industries. My issue is all the ways it’s infiltrated the essential ones and made them demonstrably worse, less efficient, and more expensive for every consumer.

I would argue that subsidization and monopolistic markets are an inevitable outcome of capitalism.

The competitive landscape where consumers vote for the best products with their purchasing decisions is simply not a sustainable equilibrium.

The ability to accumulate capital (I.e. “capitalism”) leads to regulatory protectionism through lobbying, bribery, etcetera.

I would argue that markets are a necessary step towards capitalism but it's also crucial to remember that markets can also exist outside of capitalism. The accumulation of money in a society with insufficient defenses will trend towards money being a stand-in for power and influence, but it still requires the permission and legal leeway of the system in order to actually turn it corrupt; politicians have to both be permitted to, and be personally willing to accept the checks to do the corruption in the first place.

The biggest and most salient critique of liberal capitalism as we now exist under is that it requires far too many of the "right people" to be in positions of power; it presumes good faith where it shouldn't, and fails to reckon with bad actors as what they are far too often, the modern American Republican party being an excellent example (but far from the only one).

100%. Markets are a really useful tool for distributing goods and services to people and allocating resources. In the US, IMO the problem is that markets are the primary tool for a huge number of services; take utilities for one.

There is a saying that when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

You wouldn’t see YC existing on a world full capitalist :) It depende heavily on open source, the biggest and most succeassful socialist experiment so far

Open source is a purely voluntary system. So it's not socialist, which requires state coercion to force people to "share."

On the one hand, we've got, "Pirating something because we find copyright law to be restrictive and/or corporate pricing to be excessive". On the other, we've got, "Massively wealthy people vacuuming up our creative output to further their own wealth".

And you're trying to suggest that these two are the same?

Edit: I don't mind downvotes, karma means nothing, but I do appreciate when folk speak up and say why I might be wrong. :)