The hypocrisy of Anthropic complaining about "illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities" and supporting the White House's accusation of China "stealing U.S. AI labs' intellectual property on an industrial scale" is hilarious.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, et al trained their models by ignoring the rights of copyright holders when harvesting whatever content they could. Now one of them is crying foul for another entity doing exactly what they all did?
Hilarious.
The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, except their stuff. It's okay to hammer some random website with AI crawlers, ignoring robots.txt, and causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
Anthropic, Dario especially seems have eternal grudge against China as a concept, that remind me of Thiel.
Coming from him, I am not sure even that is real. It could very easily (and plausibly) be a part of the ongoing hype drama.
"Our models so precious, US Gov has to revoke access to foreigner." - tuned up version: "Our models so advanced our #1 adversary is desperately stealing it from us."
All a facade no? It's just about regulatory capture.
I dont think so, Altman seems more likely to play regulatory capture here, but Dario seems having pure and personal hatred.
Just overly hubristic
He has an eternal grudge against anyone filling up his moat.
That's one aspect, which is a bit of a gray zone. But Anthropic trained on pirated books. That is explicitly illegal.
That ship has sailed, I would wager all the AI labs are ingesting anything human generated, whether that means Hollywood movies, Taylor Swift’s discography, YouTube videos or private GitHub source repos.
The reward for having a competitive edge is exponentially higher than the risk of a lawsuit. Politicians are still old bureaucrats who don’t understand technology.
so did Meta for Llama.
The entire chat thread and email exchange was exposed in Discovery; apparently Zuck signed off on it. In one of the IM exchanges one of them say ‘everyone is doing it’
https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1879152507865485497?s=20
As I understand it what was "explicitly illegal" was copying the books, in the sense of mere copying before feeding them to the model, and this is what the Anthropic copyright settlement is about.
Actually processing them through the model, though, was considered transformative and therefore fair use.
They didn't train on the books and that court only found that the pirating was illegal anyway.
I'd love to see an open-source project that's basically a Torrent client for downloading pirated material, but it trains an AI model "in the background" using the downloaded content. That way everyone can claim fair use for possessing copyrighted material, I mean there's precedent right?
I am not a lawyer, from what I understand that the precedent is that you can use copyrighted material in ML process. Even though meta has, allegedly, pirated the material, the cost of violation would be pennies compared to the ai spend, since that is the violation, not that they used those materials,
They were liable for copying the books in the first place, regardless of whether or not they trained the AI with them. Read the opinion.
>The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free,
The AI companies? That's been the common ethos of the internet for 40 years
I mean, raise your hand if you ad block and have a hard drive of pirated content...
> But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
It's the same question libertarian advocates cannot resolve:
It is also not a coincidence that leadership in many tech companies have expressed libertarian ideals.What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them? Because they definitely have answers to this question...
I think the typical answer is “free market” but that answer doesn’t sway because:
1. Nobody bothers to explain why something could function as a free market and
2. Nobody bothers to resolve the plethora of domains that de-facto cannot operate as free markets.
So, in that sense, they don’t have answers. “Look over there!” is not an answer.
Free markets are actually not a given. We have to build them and build in systems so that they can operate as free markets. How that intersects with healthcare, public utilities, etc is complicated. IME libertarians are reductionist and simple, which is why many people have just taken the route of ignoring their arguments.
I find this comment a bit odd. There is a ton of literature on the topic, as well as lively debate online. I would recommend both The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman and Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority (specifically pt 2) as great readings on the topic.
If one judges any idea by the average discourse on internet forums, especially throwaway comments, and trolling, no idea would ever stand up to scrutiny.
> What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them?
The latter I suppose.
I qualify my answer because what few rational responses I have seen to this question are equivocations at best and thinly veiled myopic sophistry supporting personal greed in general.
The short answer is that "shared resources" in a libertarian system is a bit of an oxymoron. It's a category error.
The long answer would probably be that access to these resources would be gated through pay-per-use, instead of a distributed taxation system. Of course for convenience you might end up with a structured way of purchasing a group of resources and it might even look like a roundabout way of taxation, although libertarians might argue that taxation is the roundabout way.
Or they might give a different answer, there are different schools of libertarianism!
* not a libertarian, but interested in niche political ideologies
Plus, the question of voluntary vs. involuntary comes in. Taxation is, in most forms, involuntary. Don't pay your taxes, eventually you'll either be arrested or the government will compel your bank to hand over what you were supposed to pay; either way you're not allowed to say "I don't plan to use public roads so I don't want to pay for them" or "I don't want my money going to support the military, I'm fine with the military not defending me if the country is ever attacked" or whatever. You have to pay the taxes, and your say in how they get spent is very indirect.
The libertarian ideal is voluntary payment for services. Don't want to pay for fire protection? You don't have to; the flip side of the bargain is that if you haven't chosen to pay for fire protection, the fire company is under no obligation to put your house out if it does catch on fire. The choice is yours, but you have to be wiling to accept the consequences of your choice as well.
Note that I have not studied the various flavors of libertarian philosophy, so some of them might well disagree with what I just said. But the voluntary/involuntary thing is pretty important to libertarians as far as I know, so it's definitely worth mentioning here.
Who gets to gate natural resources? Why should I recognize any power to do so? Purchase from who? Am I not free from any authority that would coerce me to accept such a system?
What's described is basically just a regressive tax. It doesn't sound very libertarian to me.
I read quite a bit of libertarian philosophy when I was younger, and never heard a convincing explanation of how you get private ownership of land, let alone things like the atmosphere, rivers, groundwater, etc.
Or pollution, are small amounts ok, as long as nobody can prove they are damaged? What if damage takes a generation, or only appears if lots of people are doing it? Diluting away the crap from burning a little oil is easy, when the whole world is doing it everybody is hurt.
Good question. Property rights are absolutely fundamental to libertarianism, perhaps second to the concept of self-ownership. Coming from classical liberal philosophy (most notably John Locke), the principle of self-ownership asserts that you own yourself, your labor, and the physical manifestations of that labor. Locke believed the earth was given to humanity in common by nature, but it required cultivation and effort to be useful. By "mixing" their labor (time, sweat, and skills) with raw land or resources, an individual removes the item from the state of nature and attaches their labor to it, making it their private property. Writers such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard expanded upon this idea (Rothbard even went as far as to ground all ethics in self-ownership and property rights).
I want to ask you since I'm curious, the state simply declared ownership over territory and resources (and in some cases used violence to uphold it), why should you recognise any power in the state's part to do so? Likely many of the same justifications can apply to individuals as well.
Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem? Neither system resolves both problems.
Extremist dogma is not a great way to run a society, but it does good numbers on social media, so here we are.
Only one is a reasonable problem in functioning societies, the other one mostly a fallacy.
Democratic socialists and social democrats solve the free rider problem through general taxation and regulation.
Consider universal healthcare as the case in point for this; we absorb the cost of chronically ill people by mixing them in with the rest of the population, at a fraction of the price that the "free market" costs to attempt and fail to do the same thing.
Actually I don't think libertarians would argue that the problem is unsolved in both systems, they would argue that the problem itself is nonsensical. Most libertarians don't believe that non-excludable positive externalities are a problem, since it involves no harm to anyone and no violation of rights. They simply don't believe that because you indirectly provide a benefit to someone, you then have the right to coerce payment.
One could argue that there is an efficiency problem however - for example, take a bee keeper whoes bees benefit their neighbours. It could be argued that if there was some means to which the keeper could exclude those positive externalities, and there some level of payment at which the surrounding property owners would be indifferent between the excludable and the nonexcludable situation, there could be a Pareto-efficient gain. And since there is no reasonable way to exclude the benefits, it leads to the conclusion that the neighbours should be coerced into payment. Most libertarians reject this type of coercion prima facie.
> Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem?
This is a fallacy (tu quoque/whataboutism). You're changing the subject to distract from the fundamental problem in libertarianism and implying that some other strawman is just as bad.
Without solving the fundamental problem, libertarianism will never work for anything but toy societies.
Your spidey sense is failing you, you're making assumptions you've got no ground for. I've voted for left of centre parties all my life. I was born in the NHS and I'll probably die there too.
Tbf I don't think he is implying you are certain political group/view/spectrum. He is just arguing your flip argument.
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It's not exactly the same, since any Claude output is public domain under current law. So the Chinese aren't stealing anything here.
What's yours is mine, and what's mine is still mine.
Not really even in the same ballpark as what they did. These other labs are using AI generated content (which has already been ruled un-copyrightable) to train their models. Oh and they are paying for those tokens. So at absolute worst, they are violating the terms of service. The horror. Meanwhile these frontier AI labs pirated and scraped everything they possibly could, paying not a dime to the copyright owners, nor paying anything to the websites they DDoSed.
there's no honor among thieves.
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Not really.
Data mining for AI is presumably fair use, whereas when you sign up for a Claude account, you enter into a legally binding contract that says you will not distill a model based on its outputs.
I guess they can try to sue. Good luck.
“Legally binding” bs that a judge would laugh off.