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Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

Fine-tuning the weights scrambles the original representations (sometimes more than others depending on training settings, but if you train the text encoder it certainly will). All authors have to do is not be honest about the original model it was fine-tuned on in a world where lawyers start to come down on this.

I see no issue for businesses using it.

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I don't know - it sounds like your default assumption is that there is no issue because businesses can commit copyright infringement/fraud and not be caught, I am not a lawyer so I can't comment on the merits of the approach.

Generally I think it is difficult for businesses to break the law given that any one of the members might defect on you.

Also I suspect that the logprobs for various sequences would reveal which foundation model you used.

I do not think it has been determined that weights are copyrightable

That's not the issue here, regardless of if it's true or not.

The issue here is that if you have some upstream with license XXX on it, you can most certainly slap some YYY license on your repo, but that doesn't make it true.

This is like when someone pushes up a corporate private repo and puts an MIT license file on the repo.

Releasing code as GPL when you dont have the authority to do so, does not make the code GPL.

Certainly, as a consumer you can say that you 'didn't know' it was not actually MIT, but that doesn't absolve you from liability; as a consumer, you are required to do your due diligence, and if upon finding that you were mislead / mistaken / whatever, take steps to remediate it.

...otherwise you're liable.

It's that simple.

I think the parent comment is implying that they don't believe they are liable for infringement since, based on their understanding of the law, model weights are not copyrightable in the first place, and until a court actually rules on the issue, there's nothing to remediate.

Yes thank you. I can put xxx license on a math equation but everyone can ignore it because the equation isn’t subject to licensing regardless of who or when it was made. I believe the same is true for weights (at least in some places, tbd in others)

It is my understanding that you can compare weights and with a high degree of confidence determine what the parent of a model is unless the fine tuning destroyed all the original information in which case there isn’t a huge reason to have fine tuned to begin with. There are other ways to scramble weights which make the comparisons a lot harder to do though which will matter if weights ever are considered copyrightable

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