> Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only think I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".
It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it. The machine DID NOT pay for the book, DID NOT compensate the author and still learnt from it anyways.
We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified.
EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.
So naturally the price should be determined based on this new species capabilities. I would not sell my software license for the same price to an Enterprise the size of Google that I would sell to a fellow developer. I price my product appropriately. With this entry of a new alien specie authors would need to have different tiers for them. Since these chips can train on petabytes of data and create models in a matter of days/weeks/months, it is obviously not comparable to a human being who has the capacity to ingest maybe 1-5 books a month at most. So the payout has to be different too.
The multiplication comparison makes no sense because humans don’t learn by multiplying numbers to change weights. It’s like comparing the lubrication oil consumption of a car to the cooking oil consumption of a human to compare the carrying capacity. That’s an implementation detail inside the GPU and doesn’t let you compare how much they learn. Otherwise, a human would learn much less in their whole life than a GPU does in one second.
> That’s an implementation detail inside the GPU and doesn’t let you compare how much they learn.
The same applies to "horse-power". Yet we have no issue making the comparison anyways and HP has become an industry standard. I don't understand why we have to bend-over backwards when it comes to humans being exploited by AI companies.
> The same applies to "horse-power". Yet we have no issue making the comparison anyways and HP has become an industry standard.
Yeah, which is why it's only used to compare cars etc. among each other. Nobody would calculate the equivalence of a car to a horse using their HP rating because a horse doesn't even have 1 HP. They have more or less depending on the task you're doing. It was a marketing thing at the time to make steam engines look good.
In france, cars are taxed by their engine power. Do you think pedestrians walking on the sidewalk should be taxed according to their power on an ergometer too?
Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?
> It was a marketing thing at the time to make steam engines look good.
Except it is actually taxed based on HP in various countries. Austria, Belgium, Spain, Italy use engine horsepower to levy annual car taxes.
> In france, cars are taxed by their engine power. Do you think pedestrians walking on the sidewalk should be taxed according to their power on an ergometer too?
Citizens are paying taxes for betterment of roads irrespective of whether they own vehicles or not. In India, betterment charges are collected for construction/maintenance of roads if you own land. Property tax collected every year has a certain allocation for maintenance/upkeep of roads. Apart from that, money from direct and indirect tax collections are allocated for roads upkeep as well. It just is done indirectly rather than a direct road tax if you have vehicles (road tax is actually an extra tax you pay APART from taxes you already pay for upkeep/maintenance of roads).
> Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?
Except in your own examples it can easily be shown that it is not handled differently. Some countries use HP while others use CC. But end of the day, they use some measurement to determine taxes to be paid. It is not free.
EDIT: Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?
To answer this in more detail: HP/CC and all other measurements were created to equalize with human specific metrics. Bridges, for example, have safety measured based on how much weight it can sustain at any given time (called load limit). Weight, in this specific case, is an equalizing measurement (it can be in tonnes, kN, PSF, Pa etc). A bridge can hold ten thousand humans or thousand trucks. You can argue that a "human" may not weigh 100 kgs or a truck may not weigh exactly 1 ton. That's fine. It is a rough approximate to equalize unequal entities.
> Except in your own examples it can easily be shown that it is not handled differently.
I was talking about humans vs. cars as an analogy to you comparing GPUs and cars.
Nobody is taxing humans the way cars are taxed, so why should the computing speed of a GPU be compared to that of a human?
> A bridge can hold ten thousand humans or thousand trucks. You can argue that a "human" may not weigh 100 kgs or a truck may not weigh exactly 1 ton. That's fine. It is a rough approximate to equalize unequal entities.
And you do not think that comparing weights to measure bridge load makes a lot more sense than comparing FLOPS to determine learning of GPUs vs humans?
EDIT: Maybe let's just go back to the original point
> We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified.
So you want to compare the learning rate of a GPU to that of a human by comparing their respective FLOPS. Why would FLOPS be a valid proxy for learning ability in humans just because that works out in GPUs, if the way they learn is fundamentally different?
Is the effect of someone reading a copyrighted book dependent on how fast they are at doing math in their head?
> I was talking about humans vs. cars as an analogy to you comparing GPUs and cars.
I was talking about cars vs horses. HP is Horse-power not human-power.
> Nobody is taxing humans the way cars are taxed
Cars are not free to roam the road. I don't know why it is so hard for you to understand that we use metrics like HP/CC etc to equalize with humans so that automobiles can be taxed just like humans. Without metrics like HP/CC etc there is no way to tax cars. Get it?
> Nobody is taxing humans the way cars are taxed
Duh. It is the opposite. We use deterministic metrics for automobiles to tax them the way WE ALREADY HAVE BEEN TAXING HUMANS for thousands of years. Get it? Cars did not come first. Humans came first.
> so why should the computing speed of a GPU be compared to that of a human?
Because, believe it or not, we built computers to replace humans. The very point of computing was because humans are "SLOW" to do mundane computations, repeatedly, with 100% efficiency and not be subjected to biological functions like wanting to eat, sleep or shit. So there is a direct connection between the computing speed and human replacement. There used to be a time where CPU computing speed was touted in terms of how many humans it replaced... IBM's 1951 Electronic Calculator ad about "150 extra engineers" makes the point. We have ALWAYS built computing as a proxy to human replacement. Heck, even AI is touted to replace humans by the very same people who are training the models.
Now it is quite ridiculous to then turn around and ask why should computing speed of a GPU be compared to that of a human. It is literally the building block of model training/evals/inference. The very basis for automation that is replacing humans. Obviously people are going to relate the two together.
> And you do not think that comparing weights to measure bridge load makes a lot more sense than comparing FLOPS to determine learning of GPUs vs humans?
Come on you are clutching at straws here. It is not about "making sense". It is about using a metric to equalize unequal entities. When I am already saying they are unequal and have no direct relation to each other and any relation can only be arrived at indirectly. FLOPS is just an example I gave. I am not saying we should literally go with the FLOPS example itself. But we can use any metric and equalize it with human work. That's all I am getting it. It is the same argument as Horse-power.
Also comparing weights to measure bridge load is the exact same thing. Do you question how a human being gained enough weight to become 100 kgs? Do you question how a truck that has a dead weight of 0.5 ton became 1 ton? No you do not. You do not care about the process of how some entity gained the weight it did. You only care about what can be measured at that instant of time and how much of that passes through the bridge. It doesn't matter if the weight is gained by consuming calories or by loading boxes if the end goal is use of a bridge. Same way, it doesn't matter how the GPU learns something vs how human learns something if the end goal is knowledge generation.
> So you want to compare the learning rate of a GPU to that of a human by comparing their respective FLOPS. Why would FLOPS be a valid proxy for learning ability in humans just because that works out in GPUs,
Because that is the only metric we can use to measure how quickly GPUs can process arithmetic (you can label it "training" or "learning" or whatever name you want). There is no other metric that is deterministic and comparable to something humans do (which is also process arithmetic).
> if the way they learn is fundamentally different?
It does not matter if how they learn is fundamentally different. Automobiles use an engine to move around. Humans use legs. We both are still taxed. Automobiles are taxed on metrics like HP/CC etc. Humans are taxed via betterment taxes while purchasing property and yearly property tax. The point I am making is that it is not free to ride an automobile on the roads which are built for pedestrians fundamentally. Hence why "right of way" is for pedestrians first and foremost. Because roads existed before automobiles or any animal-drawn cart ever existed. We figured out a way to tax automobiles by way of metrics that is deterministic and quantifiable. You may ask why should cars be taxed on HP/CC while humans are not taxed on their legs etc. That is totally missing the point being made.
> Is the effect of someone reading a copyrighted book dependent on how fast they are at doing math in their head?
It is fundamentally math. Every physical law in the Universe is expressed and backed by math. So on a fundamental level, yes "reading" is essentially maths only. I hope you agree that reading/comprehension is essentially maths at play. How your brain computes (see how this word is valid in this context?), stores and evaluates incoming knowledge is all mathematical in nature. On a fundamental level it is the same thing with GPUs as well. It is just maths. GPUs are great at extreme parallelized computation while human brains are serial and slow at computation. So both can be compared and taxed accordingly.
How much to tax you ask? Each GPU has capability to do the same task 3.56 quadrillion people would do on a mathematical level. It is absolutely fair to ask AI companies to fund the survival of the entire human race (which is 8 billion+ people and far, far less than 3.56 quadrillion) which it seeks to replace with robots and automation. That is the perfect amount of tax they can pay. And funnily enough, irrespective of whether I ask for it or not, they will have to come up with some form of UBI if they themselves have to sustain and pay their shareholders. Because a jobless World will not be able to use their products anyways.
> EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.
News to me. That would be incredibly xenophobic of them if they did, and deserves to be called out.
> News to me. That would be incredibly xenophobic of them if they did, and deserves to be called out.
What do you mean? Xenophobia does not mean what you think it means, especially so in this context. Also, every creator/producer of content has rights on who/what has access to his/her produced work. It is not xenophobia. And it is definitely not xenophobic to call out stealing of copyrighted works.
EDIT: Let me clarify this further. A recent court ruling (in US) established that ONLY humans can be authors of copyrightable works. As a consequence of that assertion, it can be safely concluded that consumers of the copyrightable work MUST ONLY be humans as well. Else it would be, using your own words, "xenophobic" against humans to have their copyrightable works be consumed by any species (other than humans) while the reverse is not recognized by Law.
https://www.reinhartlaw.com/news-insights/only-humans-can-be...
> A recent court ruling (in US) established that ONLY humans can be authors of copyrightable works. As a consequence of that assertion, it can be safely concluded that consumers of the copyrightable work MUST ONLY be humans as well.
That does not follow in any reasonable way.
> That does not follow in any reasonable way.
"United States copyright law protects only works of human creation". That means the source of creation of any work has to be from a human being for it to be copyrightable. Machine-generated output is not copyrightable and is public domain by default. If you, for example, use Claude to generate code for you, for any project (be it private or public), it is automatically public domain and you have no way to claim copyright over that generated work. It can be used by anyone (including the AI provider) to further train models or heck duplicate your work with zero consequences. So it is a violation of primary producer of copyright work (which was used in training models) as neither was he/she compensated for use of the work, but subsequent derivations (generated work) even strip of his/her legal protections as guaranteed by Constitution of various countries (in US copyright law applies only to human beings). So naturally it follows that copyrightable work can only be consumed by humans. Machine-generated code is not on the same footing. It is violating copyright law.
"It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it."
I went to the library. Didn't pay a cent.
Now what?
Library paid the authors.
> Didn't pay a cent.
Taxpayers did pay on your behalf by funding the Library via the Government (if Library is public).
Nothing is free. Except ofcourse stealing, which is free.
Do you not think that stealing requires the original owner to lose access?
If I sneak into your home, take apart the coffee machine, measure everything, put it back together and go home and build a copy to have my own, did I steal your coffee machine?
Can we not just stick to calling it copyright infringement?
> Do you not think that stealing requires the original owner to lose access?
No.
> If I sneak into your home, take apart the coffee machine, measure everything, put it back together and go home and build a copy to have my own, did I steal your coffee machine?
Not mine. But the company that made the coffee machine. It is stealing IP.
> Can we not just stick to calling it copyright infringement?
It is just a fancy way of saying you stole someone's IP. You can call it infringement if it makes you feel good. But the act is the same end of the day.
Sunshine, air, wind, gravity, radioactivity, public domain, knowledge passed on
I would not classify sunshine and air as "free". Sunshine requires the Sun to undergo continuous fusion. It is invaluable as opposed to "free". Air is invaluable asset too. Without both we would be dead. The price of both is literally price of my being alive every second of my existence.
Public domain on the other hand is legally only possible if/when copyright has expired. That means the owner has enjoyed proceeds from copyright protection for more than his own lifetime. That is fair. It is still not comparable.
EDIT: since you tacked on more like "wind, gravity, radioactivity" etc, I would still not classify them as "free". They are invaluable to very existence of life.
"Knowledge passed on" is also after someone (in ancestry) has paid for it through blood, sweat and tears. It isn't "free". "Public domain" is legally recognized form of "knowledge passed on".
They all have “some price”, because of universal laws, but i doubt you would be friends with a corporate entity claiming the ip of them.
> but i doubt you would be friends with a corporate entity claiming the ip of them.
They can't claim. That's the point. They are an invaluable resource precisely because they cannot be OWNED by anyone. They are not FREE.
Hence why even corporate entities that deal with solar, wind etc talking about "HARNESSING" energy. They don't talk about OWNERSHIP of energy.
Point taken. Thank you.