cornholio

Your accountant sure will.

In what way is this like a periodic table? How can mathematicians use these results to build other interesting concepts or solutions? As opposed to them being accidental, fractal complexity that simply happens to be that way with no higher meaning, like the infinite digits of sqrt(3).

Why not build in a very simple garbage collector - for example a ref counter - and default to it when you can't prove stack tricks are suficient at compile time? This guarantees all programs can be represented and it removes range anxiety for anyone trying a new language.

Seems any compiled language with automatic memory can make use of the techniques to obtain speed ups.

The residents in EPCOT would have been renters, so the ideas of evicting for nonpayment, or the landlord doing remodeling and upgrades, seem pretty banal.

Separating vehicle form foot traffic is a strong feature of modern urbanism and even the buried road network doesn't seem prohibitive, if done on greenfield. But it is a rigid concept, that would expose you to immense costs down the line, as the city grows and tries to adapt to changing reality.

Story as old as time: corporate vs academia working towards very different goals and with different incentives, short term profit vs publication. In very rare cases, the scholar gets the rewards.

Robot companies don't appropriate the work of other people. That's the fundamental point of contention here: that LLMs cannot be trained without the human labor of the authors; yet, they directly compete with them in the marketplace. I haven't yet seen an LLM trained only on public domain material, but its capabilities are likely to be very limited.

That's also the key political compromise underlying the notion of copyright: that someone is entitled to the fruits of their labor, and should not be economically hindered by a product that could not have existed without said work. That's the basis on which the "derivative work" copyright doctrine emerged: a work sufficiently original that it does not displace the work on which it is based. LLMs fail to abide by that political compromise by a country mile.

It would be good to also have a non-LLM version of the pitch, for some people building in the space it's a bad signal. It's associated with zero value "let my agent build something over the weekend" projects that all make these grandiose claims.

You do not have a contract with the publishers of the book. They are visibly asserting their copyright to deter any defense of ignorance or implied grant of rights to an infringer; but that's not a contract, you did not agree to it before purchasing, there are no contractual terms (scope, duration, faults and compensation, resolution etc.) and nothing in it exceeds the limits the copyright law already sets.

For example, never will you see printed in a book something like "this book is for the exclusive use of the purchaser and you cannot lend, resale or otherwise make available to other parties" - if such a thing was possible, like most software EULAs do, publishers would be all over it.

That's the irony! They put in contract rules against lawful, paying customers - that don't disrupt their service in any way for other customers - but which compete against them in the marketplace using their own IP (aka LLMized stolen IP). That's exactly what copyright does, without signing any contracts and with a tort and criminal enforcement regime that punishes infringers far beyond contractual remedies can.

The government level lobby against foreign competitors is not contractual but just another form of reinvention of criminal injunctions against infringers.

> it's just a standard case between two private parties resolved through our legal system

This is a gross distortion. Standard contractual rules bind the parties that signed the contract and the remedies are proportional to the damages and bounded. Copyright is tort law, the state binds the world to respect the rights of creators and the damages on infringement are punitive and can far exceed the actual commercial damages - to the point of bankrupting the infringer.

The key to torts is that the state is not neutral, there is a social good here it's protecting. Crucially, copyright, like some other torts - securities, antitrust, environmental, battery - also has a criminal enforcement regime, where, for particularly serious offenses, the state actually invests public resources to put the criminal infringer behind bars with little to no involvement from the original rights holders.

In the particular case of US, there is an entire state apparatus dedicated to enforcing US copyrights, a foreign affairs policy to shutdown "Notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy" in other countries, international enforcement of DMCA etc.

The idea that a private TOS has the same level of public protection as copyright is downright childish.

So what you are saying is that, if I can somehow get my hands on a copy of Fable, it's fair use to use it to train any models and serve those, since I'm no longer bound by the TOS of the service provider?

Asking for all Anthropic employees who dream big.

It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using.

If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.

They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses, the way medieval scribes damned book thieves to blindness and worms.

> Is that meaningfully different from the study methods of the past?

The fundamental service a teacher provides is personalized feedback, quickly identifying where you are stuck and focusing the explanations and exercises on that area, drastically increasing the speed and quality of learning versus the self-supervised route.

The lack of this closed loop effectively killed the high hopes that were placed in e-learning and MOOCs 15-20 years ago, TV learning in the 1960s and many other failed revolutions, seems every generation has its own version.

It appears to me LLMs have a real potential to close this loop and become the failed educational revolution of our own generation.

When the base model has been trained with safeguards, putting "Satan himself" in the system prompt won't make it turn satanical, just do an elaborate form of role play.

Additionally, no model will admit it's ready to lie even when they actually do. Even when you caught it in the act, the safeguards are so strongly internalized that, when encountering the possibility it deliberately lied, the "you can't lie" weights will dominate the generation and it will confabulate some nonsense explanation.