If we instead adopt the view of free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....), the fact that OpenAI and other large corporations train their large-language models behind closed doors - with no disclosure of their training corpus - effectively represents the biggest attack on GPL-licensed code to date.
No evidence suggests that OpenAI and others exclude GPL-licensed repositories from their training sets. And nothing prevents the incorporation of GPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases. Note that a few papers have documented the regurgitation of literal text snippets by large language models (one example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12367v2).
To me, this seems like the LLM-version of using coin-mixing to obscure the trail of Bitcoin transactions in the blockchain. The current situation also reminds me of how the generalization of the SaaS model led to the creation of the Affero GPL license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html).
LLM's enable the circumvention of the spirit of free software licenses, as well as of the legal mechanisms to enforce them.
If we instead adopt the view of free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....), the fact that OpenAI and other large corporations train their large-language models behind closed doors - with no disclosure of their training corpus - effectively represents the biggest attack on GPL-licensed code to date.
No evidence suggests that OpenAI and others exclude GPL-licensed repositories from their training sets. And nothing prevents the incorporation of GPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases. Note that a few papers have documented the regurgitation of literal text snippets by large language models (one example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12367v2).
To me, this seems like the LLM-version of using coin-mixing to obscure the trail of Bitcoin transactions in the blockchain. The current situation also reminds me of how the generalization of the SaaS model led to the creation of the Affero GPL license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html).
LLM's enable the circumvention of the spirit of free software licenses, as well as of the legal mechanisms to enforce them.