If I stole all veggies from your garden but spent time/money/effort making a meal, I should at minimum share it with you for free, no?
Yes, and that's exactly my point. We are in violent agreement. It's shared with me, with you, with OP, and with everybody else. We can get a delicious meal for free or we can pay somebody else to serve us a slightly-tastier version.
Here, disregarding copyright law has fulfilled the very purpose of copyright law: to advance the useful arts and sciences. Copyright law was the best tool we had to accomplish that before, and now we have something better.
I wouldn’t be happy if those companies used my vegetables to open a Michelin star restaurant, even if I got a free McDouble out of the deal.
Plant based I guess I don’t know metaphors are hard.
But the AI companies are not publishing the models? Moreover they are charging for access to the models.
Sure they are. Surf around on HuggingFace and you'll see dozens of open-weight models up to 120B parameters in size from for-profit US companies, freely downloadable (if not freely runnable, alas). Probably hundreds of them, at this point.
And a 3T parameter model is scheduled to be dropped by the Chinese on Monday.
They should certainly publish more, and if somebody were to argue that model weights trained by scraping copyrighted data should inherently be accessible to everyone, I'd be 100% in favor of that.