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Comment by ankit219 | Hacker News Reader

According to the article, the story goes this way: This engineer Jacob Devlin raised his concerns on training Bard with ShareGPT data. Then he directly joined OpenAI.

He also claims that Google were about to do it, and then they stopped after his warnings. And presumably removed every trace of openai's responses.

A couple of things:

1. So, Bard could have been trained on ShareGPT but it's not - according to the same engineer who raised the concern (and google denial in the verge).

2. Since he directly joined OpenAI, he could have told them and they could have taken action, and nothing is public on that front yet. Probably nothing to see here.

Edit: The engineer too wasnt directly involved with the Bard team, it appeared to him that Bard team was heavily relying on ShareGPT.

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For those that don't know, Jacob Devlin was the lead engineer and first publisher of the widely popular BERT model architecture, and initial bert-base models released by Google.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Jacob-Devlin/39172707

Take what action? Pretty sure that’s not illegal, especially since the training data is ai generated and therefore can’t be copyrighted.

I think the oomph behind the story is due to it being embarrassing, rather than illegal.

OpenAI could have blocked Google's accounts, for example. Nothing really to do with legality.

No one is alleging that Google directly used OpenAI's API to get training data (which would be unambiguously against TOS). The claim is that they downloaded examples from ShareGPT.

Not illegal, but that won't stop people from finding it amusing that the company considered the world's beacon of innovation is copying someone else's homework. It's hard being the favorite horse.

tech companies steal ideas all the time. snapchat invented stories and now whatsapp, facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube have them

I don't think google has really been considered a beacon of innovation for a number of years.

Your comment doesn't make sense to me.

> Bard team was heavily relying on ShareGPT.

> He also claims that Google were about to do it, and then they stopped after his warnings.

So were they heavily relying or were they about to and then stopped? It's unclear from your comment. Could you link where you're getting this info from? The Information article is walled, unfortunately.

[1] gives a jist as well.

What I meant to say was that: Acc to The Information article the engineer raised concerns because it appeared to him (article wording) Bard team was using (and heavily reliant on) ShareGPT for Bard training. The engineer wasnt working on Bard and presumably someone told him or somehow he got the impression that Bard team was reliant on ShareGPT. At the time he was at Google.

Then, when he raised concerns to Sundar Pichai, Bard team stopped doing it and also scrapped any traces of ShareGPT data. So, the headline is false and Bard (again presumably) is not trained on any of ShareGPT data.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/29/23662621/google-bard-chat...

I think I might be confused by your usage of “about to do it” in your original comment to mean “actively doing it.”

You claim that the very engineer accusing Google of training Bard on ShareGPT acknowledges that the final product was not. As far as I can tell, Devlin did no such thing.

Not sure why you would presume they restarted their expensive training process.

It just doesn’t seem like a good faith characterization to me.

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