You don't need a license to scrape the public web and analyze it, turn it into tokens and other transformations. Let's not expand copyright beyond the horrible monster it already is.

I think it's likely that US law will continue to find training on scraped, unlicensed data to be legal.

That doesn't mean much to the many people I know of who refuse to use a technology that they see as being unethically created using the work of others without compensating them.

I continue to hope that someone will train a "vegan" model on licensed or out-of-copyright data so those people can experience the benefits of this class of technology.

(I compare them to vegans because, like vegans, I think their ethical position is credible and has merit even though I do not choose the same ethical framework for myself.)

This is as ethical as it gets. They're getting compensated by being able to use the result of their work freely. This is the rising tide that lifts all boats.

Good luck convincing the training data licensing holdouts of that.

Well, the frontier models aren't freely available in the same way that the training data (the public web) is; they're only available as a limited no-cost tier of a paid service.

There are models where the weights are released and you can run them locally, but one counter-argument I've seen is that these aren't really the models that people are excited about and making extraordinary claims about.

I don't know if it's ethically better to use LLMs trained on data licensed from X, Reddit, stackoverflow, Sony, CNN and all big content aggregators who will/have agreements with big tech. I'd prefer to focus on mechanisms to force reciprocating the donation: scrape and train at will, publish the models as open weights, at least. Anyway, the vegan LLMs exist, see the work of Pleias.ai.

Pleias is definitely the most promising.

I haven't seen a model trained on that corpus since late 2024: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/5/pleias-llms/ - I may have missed something though.

I think their business model is to work on specialized models rather than general purpose. See https://pleias.ai/blog/sillon-ratp and the focus on synthetic datasets for specific personas.

hi, so Pleias co-founder here.

Common Corpus is commonly used now in pretraining, including by close labs, but rarely as the only source (which would be the actual ethical commitment).

Like most people training efficient models we move toward synthetic pretraining, but still maintaining our committment for data research and releasability. Lead current project is SYNTH, for now based on Wikipedia but we'll generalize with seeds from Common Corpus.