Also, the difference between "uncopyrighted" and "permissively licensed in the creative commons" is nuance that is not necessary for most conversations and would be a waste of attention neurons.
<testing new explanatory metaphor>
Remember an LLM is just a language model, it says whatever comes next without thought or intent. There's no brain behind it that stores information and understands things. It's like your brain when you're in "train of thought" mode. You know when your mouth is on autopilot, saying things that make sense and connect to each other and are conversationally appropriate, but without deliberate intent behind them. And then eventually your conscious brain eventually checks in to try to reapply some intent you're like "wait what was I saying?" and you have to deliberatly stop your language-generation brain for a minute and think hard and remember what your point was supposed to be. That's what llms are, train-of-thought with no conductor.
</testing new explanatory metaphor>
You can say that you have fair use to the work, or a license to use the work, or that the work is itself a "collection of facts" or "recipe" or "algorithm" without a creative component and thus copyright does not apply.
It has something to do with it. There will be scenarios where the definition of "copyrighted material" does matter, even if they come up relatively infrequently for Databricks' intended use cases. If I ask DBRX directly whether it was trained on copyrighted material, it's quite likely to (falsely) tell me that it was not. This seems suboptimal to me (though perhaps they A/B tested different prompts and this was indeed the best).