In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices: release under something permissive like MIT (no real restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.
These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.
I don't think it changes much about licensing in particular. People are going on about how since the AI was trained on this code, that makes it a derivative work. But it must be borne in mind that AI training doesn't usually lead to memorizing the training data, but rather learning the general patterns of it. In the case of source code, it learns how to write systems and algorithms in general, not a particular function. If you then describe an interface to it, it is applying general principles to implement that interface. Its ability to succeed in this depends primarily on the complexity of the task. If you give it the interfaces of a closed source and open sourced project of similar complexity, it will have a relatively equal time of implementing them.
Even prior to this, relatively simple projects licensed under share alike licenses were in danger of being cloned under either proprietary or more permissive licenses. This project in particular was spared, basically because the LGPL is permissive enough that it was always easier to just comply with the license terms. A full on GPLed project like GCC isn't in danger of an AI being able to clone it anytime soon. Nevermind that it was already cloned under a more permissive license by human coders.
> or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.
I guess it depends on your intention, but eventually I'm not sure it'll even be possible to keep it "fully proprietary and closed" in the hopes of no one being able to replicate it, which seems to be the main motivation for many to go that road.
If you're shipping something, making something available, others will be able to use it (duh) and therefore replicate it. The barrier for being able to replicate things like this either together with LLMs or letting the LLM straight it up do it themselves with the right harness, seems to get lowered real quick, massive difference in just a few years already.
Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing.
And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.
>Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing.
It doesn't if Dan Blanchard spends some tokens on it and then licenses the output as MIT.
Who are you talking about? I can't find reference to this person.
He is the maintainer of chardet. The main topic of the article is the whole LGPL to MIT rewrite and relicense done by this person.
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/releases/tag/7.0.0
There were two other posts about this today on the HN front page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257803
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
> Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing.
LLM companies and increasingly courts view LLM training as fair use, so copyright licensing does not enter the picture.
If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had while writing the code & then some.
I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data centers to make the fiction into a reality.
Real AI will never be invented, because as AI systems become more capable we'll figure out humans weren't intelligent in the first place, therefore intelligence never existed.
Don't worry, just 10 more data centers & a few more gigawatts will get you there even if the people building the data centers & powerplants are unintelligent & mindless drones. But in any event, I have no interest in religious arguments & beliefs so your time will be better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion to fill whatever void was left by secular education since such people are much more amenable to religious indoctrination & will very likely find many of your arguments much more persuasive & convincing.
I mean, it sounds kinda like you're the one making religious arguments. My response is one mocking how poorly egotistical people deal with the AI effect.
Evolution built man that has intelligence based on components that do not have intelligence themselves, it is an emergent property of the system. It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emergent property of the system. No woo woo needed.
Me & a few friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon. Our mission is based on sound scientific & engineering principles we have observed on the surface of the planet which allows regular people to scale heights they could not by jumping or climbing. We only need a few trillions of dollars & a sufficiently large wall to support it while we climb up to the moon.
There are lots of other analogies but the moon ladder is simple enough to be understood even by children when explaining how nothing can emerge from inert building blocks like transistors that is not reducible to their constituent parts.
As I said previously, your time will be much better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion b/c they will be much more susceptible to your beliefs in emergent properties of transistors & data centers of sufficient scale & magnitude.
>Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of
So with "Real AI" you actually mean artificial superintelligence.
I wrote what I meant & meant what I wrote. You can take up your argument w/ the people who think they're working on AI by adding more data centers & more matrix multiplications to function graphs if you want to argue about marketing terms.
I was just thinking that calling artificial superintelligence "Real AI" was funny.
Corporate marketing is very effective. I don't have as many dollars to spend on convincing people that AI is when they give me as much data as possible & the more data they give me the more "super" it gets.
> b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior.
This is not always true, for an extreme example see Indistinguishability obfuscation.