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Comment by hehdhdjehehegwv | Hacker News Reader

So basically I, as an open source author, had my code eaten up by Mistral without my consent, but if I want to use their code model I’m subject to a bunch of restrictions that benefit their bottom line?

The problem these AI companies have is they live in a glass house and they can’t throw IP rocks around without breaking their own “your content is our training data” foundation.

They only reason I can think of that Google doesn’t go after OpenAI for scraping YouTube is then they’d put themselves in the same crosshairs, and may set a precedent they’d also be bound by.

Given the model is “on the web” I have the same rights as Mistral to use anything online however I want without regard for IP, right?

Utter absurdity.

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No. You are welcome to learn from Mistral's works, either as a meatbag or via machine agent.

You are not allowed to reproduce Mistral's works (beyond the usual Fair Use allowances).

Nor is Mistral entitled to reproduce your works (unless you have licensed as such).

If it does, you can sue for copyright infringement.

This is an actively litigated and unsettled area of law. You, and nobody else, can say any of this with confidence until these lawsuits get to a judge, and even then it’s per jurisdiction rulings. The US, EU, and Japan may end up with different rulings. International trade agreements may be updated. Industry may settle on some sort of broadly acceptable revenue sharing model.

The point is: nobody knows and the AI companies are getting well ahead of the law.

Those cases are about applying these principals to specific events/facts.

But what part about what I said do you believe to be undecided?

That a human can learn without violating copyright? That a machine can learn without violating copyright?

Literally everything about ML training and IP is undecided.

Lol thinking those are outside the law

The law is interpreted anew each day. Nothing is outside the law.

Perhaps if all rules were written in stone, and clear of ambiguity, we would not need judges or the legal process. But that’s not how any of this works.

Reproducing is a special case of learning.

No. You can reproduce the works of Shakespeare without learning them, and you can learn the works of Shakespeare without being able to reproduce them.

There is some overlap, but if you think you've found some undiscovered loophole in centuries of copyright law, you're mistaken.

The concept of "intelectual property" is crazy to begin with, you can't own a thing that is not economically scarse. Nobody owns the atmosphere, nobody owns math, nobody owns a sequence of bytes. If you can copy it, you can't steal it. You have the natural right to use their public code the way you want, as they have the natural right to use your public code the way they want. In the positivist game though, wins whoever has more money to spare on lawyers, so you lose by default even if you wanna play the legal game. The deep pockets always win on that front.

IP is cultural maximalism paperclipping. It ties ambiguous substrings not economically explained to as much of human output as mechanically possible and arbitrarily inflate importance of living humans.

Which is a great thing.

I used to spend a lot of time (thousands of hours) contributing to open source projects. Over the past few years I've stopped contributing (except minor fixes) to any project under MIT/Apache or similar licences.

Has anyone else done this?

Interesting, I think that’s a totally valid response to this trend of capturing “value” of open source via Cloud Services (for a while now) and Code Gen (more recent).

I think SV is just dead set on killing the golden goose of open source and the web by extracting as much as possible with no regard for the wasteland left behind.

> So basically I, as an open source author, had my code eaten up by Mistral without my consent

Not necessarily. You consented to people reading your code and learning from it when you posted it on Github. Whether or not there's an issue with AI doing the same remains to be settled. It certainly isn't clear cut that separate consent would be required.

I did not give consent to train on my software and the license does not allow commercial use of it.

They have taken my code and now are dictating how I can use their derived work.

Personally I think these tools are useful, but if the data comes from the commons the model should also belong to the commons. This is just another attempt to gain private benefit from public work.

There are legal issues to be resolved, and there is an explosion of lawsuits already, but the fact pattern is simple and applies to nearly all closed-source AI companies.

Mistral is as open as they get, most others are far worse. Here you can use the model without issues, as others are saying it’s doubtful they would sue you if you were to use code generated by the model in a commercial app

Replit’s replit-code[1,2] is CC BY-SA 4.0 for the weights, Apache 2.0 for the sources. Replit has its own unpleasant history[3], but the model’s terms are good. (The model itself is not as good, but deciding whether that’s a worthwhile tradeoff is up to you. The tradeoff exists and is meaningful, is my point.)

[1] https://huggingface.co/replit/replit-code-v1-3b

[2] https://huggingface.co/replit/replit-code-v1_5-3b

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

This model is more restricted than Mistral and Mixtral - this is a new development from them.

MIT/BSD code is fair game, but isn't the whole point of GPL/AGPL "you can read and share and use this, but you can't take it and roll it into your closed commercial product for profit"? It seems like what Mistral and co are doing is a fundamental violation of the one thing GPL is striving to enforce.

Precisely, this is such a basic violation of GPL it’s mind boggling they went for it.

No. Either MIT/BSD code isn't fair game because it requires attribution, or GPL/AGPL code is fair game because it isn't copyright infringement in the first place so no license is required.

It'll be a court fight to determine which. Worse, it will be a court fight that plays out in a bunch of different countries and they probably won't all come to the same conclusion. It's unlikely the two licenses have a different effect here though. Either they both forbid it, or neither had the power to forbid it in the first place.

> but isn't the whole point of GPL/AGPL "you can read and share and use this, but you can't take it and roll it into your closed commercial product for profit"?

You can profit from GPL / AGPL code but just also make all your source code open source and available for everyone to see.

Is there an updated version of these license(s) that explicitly excludes projects from being used for training of AIs?

> You consented to people reading your code and learning from it when you posted it on Github.

And if I never posted my code to github, but someone else did? What if someone had posted proprietary code they had no rights to to github at the same time the scraper bots were trawling it? A few years ago some Windows source code was leaked onto Github - did Microsoft consent then?

>They only reason I can think of that Google doesn’t go after OpenAI for scraping YouTube is then they’d put themselves in the same crosshairs, and may set a precedent they’d also be bound by.

It's like killing Caesar. As long as we all stab him, everyone is guilty and no one can prosecute us.

While you might call it absurd, I feel like these glass houses are why we've seen so much rapid progress with AI recently.

call it an Enterprise poison pill.

But a pill they also have to swallow.

Enterprise suicide cult.

> They only reason I can think of that Google doesn’t go after OpenAI for scraping YouTube is then they’d put themselves in the same crosshairs, and may set a precedent they’d also be bound by.

It will be the smartphone patent wars all over again with hundreds of lawsuits against big tech and AI companies.

We are already past the 'fair use' excuses at this point especially when OpenAI is slowly striking deals with news companies to train on their content (with their permission) and with intent of commercializing the model.

I think a lot of the license motivation is to have real time information for RAG. I doubt that is being used for foundation training, it’s just not enough volume.

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