But asking the trained model lots of questions, and creating a similar but different open weights model? No, that's fair use.
The current copyright rules cover both cases well and benefit everyone, I think. (I think copyrights are waaay too long, but that's another topic....) Whether trillion dollar companies can ever make a profit once open weights competitors distill them is, frankly, not our concern.
But asking the trained model lots of questions, and creating a similar but different open weights model? No, that's fair use.
The current copyright rules cover both cases well and benefit everyone, I think. (I think copyrights are waaay too long, but that's another topic....) Whether trillion dollar companies can ever make a profit once open weights competitors distill them is, frankly, not our concern.