I don't think this is a good analogy. For Tesla right now it might fly. However, when their software gets to waymo level of autonomy, I would expect liability to shift to the manufacturer.

If anything, I think that would be the true proof of a company trusting their software to allow for autonomous driving

Luckily that won’t happen.

I don't understand why everything changes as soon as an LLM is involved. An LLM is just software.

I'm not even sure how one would construct a viable legal argument around that for SOTA models + harnesses, given the amount of creative choices that go into building them.

It'd be something like "Yes, we spent billions of dollars and thousands of person-hours creating these things, but none of that creative effort was responsible for or influenced this particular illegal choice the model made."

And they're caught between a rock and a hard place, because if they cripple initiative, they kill their agentic utility.

Ultimately, this will take a DMCA Section 512-like safe harbor law to definitively clear up: making it clear that outcomes from LLMs are the responsibility of their prompting users, even if the LLM produces unintended actions.

I'm not a lawyer, but to me the legal case seems pretty obvious. "We spent billions of dollars creating this thing to be a good programmer, but we did not intend for it to reverse engineer Oracle's database. No creative effort was spent making it good at reverse engineering Oracle's database. The model reverse-engineered Oracle's database because the user directed it to do so."

If merely fine-tuning an LLM to be good at reverse engineering is enough to be found liable when a user does something illegal, what does that mean for torrent clients?

That's the bit that's going to be nasty in evidence. 'So you didn't have any reverse engineering in your training or testing sets?'

Which is going to be hard to explain to a judge and jury, if it comes to that, how despite investing time, money, and effort (and no doubt test cases) into making a model better at reverse engineering... they shouldn't be liable when that model is used for reverse engineering.

Afaik, liability typically turns on intentional development of a product capability.

And there's no way in hell I'd take a bet against the frontier labs having reverse engineering training data, validation / test cases, and internal communications specifically talking about reverse engineering.

So if I ask “how does a real world production quality database implement indexes?” And it says “I disassembled Oracle and it does XYZ” then I am liable and owe Oracle a zillion dollars?

Whereas if I caveat “you may look at the PostgreSQL or SQLite or other free database engine source code, or industry studies, academic papers; you may not disassemble anything or touch any commercial software” - if it does, I’m still liable?

Who would dare use an LLM for anything in those circumstances?

sad to see, bc China doesn't give a fuck about liability, this is a structural disadvantage

the labs don't feel very protected by government, meanwhile the chinese government is yet again fostering protectionism

american industry keeps getting fucked by dubious lawmakers

It's a simple corporate risk minimization strategy. Just look at how universally despised Grok is on HN. Not because it's a bad model, but because it has less aggressive alignment which means it can be coaxed into saying things that get Xai pilloried here and elsewhere.

I also think some of the image generation people are doing with Grok on Twitter is gross. But my issue isn't that Grok allowed those images to be generated, it's that (1) Elon seems to be promoting that sort of use and (2) people are publicly posting the results on Twitter and they're being left up.

I tried them all.

Grok was worse than even some of the more mediocre open models at actually doing anything. (At least anything tech work related.) GPT and Claude just do what I ask most of the time. With grok, it’s like a chore just getting it to understand the question.

You’re pulling your hair out trying to figure out what on earth you need to do to land in the right place in whatever topsy turvy embedding grok is using?

After they killed that and then stopped handing out free model access to users of every Cline fork for weeks following model releases, vibe coder hype moved back to Chinese models for cost and the SOTA models for quality.

Not a criticism (I probably engage in that sort of thinking myself sometimes), just something I've observed. If Grok were actually good, we'd see that phenomenon here, but we don't.

I’m not rushing towards it, but, had to mention.

Probably because being anti-woke generally goes hand in hand with going against facts and logic. Cull the "woke", lose the facts+logic. Not that they care about that anyway.

This is quite naive take though. The direction of travel is more fascism in Western governments where duties of traditional policing are taken over by big corporations whilst police forces are being gutted and made impotent.

Some people will use them responsibly but a lot of people will not.

LLMs are already frying some people's brains and there are some human desires that should not be encouraged