I have a really hard time understanding what future world this article (and other detractors) is arguing for and why that world is made better by taking their arguments seriously.
On the practical level I agree with the part advising caution to those that might end up embedding an identifiably licensed snippet in their codebase via copilot. I also agree that copilot users plagiarizing significant chunks of GPL code for profit is immoral. This needs to be prevented.
I also share the frustration stemming from big companies leveraging their disproportional access to data and resources for profit given that the greatest value of these models is precisely the open source code it is trained on.
Ultimately though, what I care about is the potential for building better tools. LLMs potentially offer paths towards genuinely new forms of human-machine interaction, and I don’t want that exploration to be suffocated by legalism.
On the practical level I agree with the part advising caution to those that might end up embedding an identifiably licensed snippet in their codebase via copilot. I also agree that copilot users plagiarizing significant chunks of GPL code for profit is immoral. This needs to be prevented.
I also share the frustration stemming from big companies leveraging their disproportional access to data and resources for profit given that the greatest value of these models is precisely the open source code it is trained on.
Ultimately though, what I care about is the potential for building better tools. LLMs potentially offer paths towards genuinely new forms of human-machine interaction, and I don’t want that exploration to be suffocated by legalism.