OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

A moat by definition has such a large strategic asymmetry that one cannot cross it without a very high chance of death. A functioning SEC and FTC as well as CFPB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_... are necessary for efficient markets.

Now might be the time to rollout consumer club cards that are adversarial in nature.

* The secret formula for Coke

* ASML's technology

* The "Gucci" brand

* Apple's network effects

These are genuine competitive advantages in the market. Regulatory moats and other similar things are an assault on the free market. Moats in general are not.

This is a drastic take, I think to most of us in the industry "moat" simply means whatever difficult-to-replicate competitive advantage that a firm has invested heavily in.

Regulatory capture and graft aren't moats, they're plain old corrupt business practices.

Trump should have a Most Favored Corporate status, each corporation in a vertical can compete for favor and the one that does gets to be "teacher's pet" when it comes to exemptions, contracts, trade deals, priority in resource right access, etc.

And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.

Controlling demand for services is something that could stop this, but it’s technological progress, which could enable solutions for global warming, hunger, and disease.

It’s a locomotive out-of-control. Prayer is the answer I’d think of.

No moat means Joe Anybody can compete with them. You just need billions in capital, a zillion GPUs, thousands of hyper skilled employees. You need to somehow get the attention of tens of millions of consumers (and then pull them away from the competition, ha).

Sure.

The same premise was endlessly floated about eg Uber and Google having no moats (Google was going to be killed by open search, Baidu, magic, whatever). These things are said by people that don't understand the comically vast cost of big infrastructure, branding, consumer lock-in (or consumer behavior in general), market momentum, the difficulty of raising enormous sums of capital, and so on.

Oh wait the skeptics say: what about DeepSeek. To scale and support that you're going to need what I described. What's the plan for supporting 100 million subscribers globally with a beast of an LLM that wants all the resources you can muster? Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh but wait, everyone is going to run a datacenter out of their home and operate their own local LLM, uhh nope. It's overwhelmingly staying in the cloud and it's going to cost far over a trillion dollars to power it globally over the next 20 years.

OpenAI has the same kind of moat that Google has, although their brand/reach/size obviously isn't on par at this point.

Copyright licensing is just a detail corporations are well experienced dealing with in a commercial setting, and note some gov organizations are already exempt from copyright laws. However, people likely just won't host in countries with silly policies.

Best regards =3

That would be as successful as fighting internet piracy.

Not to mention that you could outsource the AI stuff to servers sitting in Mexico or something.

If what the admin is doing is illegal, then a court stops it, and they appeal and win, then it wasn't illegal. If they appeal all the way up and lose, then they can't do it.

So what exactly is the problem?

Mind you, I am asking for nits, this isn't my idea. I don't think "the administration will ignore the supreme court" is a good nit.

Funny how they like to crow about free markets, while also running to daddy government when their position is threatened.

Not sure if that is accurate, but one of the reasons why DeepSeek R1 performs so well in certain areas is thought to be access to China's Gaokao (university entrance exam) data.

What about movies and music?

And if you sell the outputs of your model that you trained on free content, you shouldn't be able to hide behind trade secret.

It is not remotely the same, the companies training the models are stealing the content from the internet and then profiting from it when they charge for the use of those models.

Did OpenAI bought one copy of each book, or did they legaly borowed athe books and documents ?

if you copy paste rom books and claim is your content you are plagiarizing. LLMs were provent to copy paste trained content so now what? Should only big Tech be excluded from plagiarizing ?

Not really. You can't multiply yourself a million times to produce content at an industrial scale.

On the other hand, they aren’t just a copy of the training content, and whether the process that creates the weights is sufficiently transformative as to create a new work is… what’s up for debate, right?

Anyway I wish people would stop making these analogies. There isn’t a law covering AI models yet. It is a big industry at this point, and the lack of clarity seems like something we’d expect everybody (legislators and industry) to want to rectify.

This discussion reminds me of it.

Conceptually, AI basically zeros out existing IP, and makes the AI the only IP that has any value. It is hard to imagine large rights holders and courts accepting that.

The likely outcome is that courts rule against LLM creators/providers and they eventually have to settle on licensing fees with large corporate copyright holders similar to YouTube. Unlike YouTube though, this would open up LLM companies to class action lawsuits from the general public, and so it could be a much worse outcome for them.

Since "buying" a movie (as it currently applies to humans) is just buying a limited license to it for private viewing, can't the copyright holder opt to limit the $4.99 license terms to human viewing, and charge $4999 for an AI training license?

Or OpenAI could buy movies the way Disney does, by buying the actual copyright to the film.

It was also invented to keep the publishing houses under control and keep them from papering the land in anti-crown propaganda (like the stuff that fueled the civil war in England and got Charles I beheaded).

Probably one of the biggest brewing fights will be whether the models are free to tell the truth or whether they'll be mouthpieces for the ruling class. As long as they play ball with the powers that be, I predict copyrights won't be a problem at all for the chosen winners.

What are you talking about.

Elephant in the room. If copyright and patent both expired after 20 years or so then I might feel very differently about the system, and by extension about machine learning practices.

It's absurd to me that broad cultural artifacts which we share with our parent's (or even grandparent's) generation can be legally owned.

> not only a work, but even the ideas and knowledge contained in that work

AI models reproduce existing audio tracks when asked, although in a distorted and low-quality form.

Also it will be funny to observe how US government will try to ignore violating copyright for AI while issuing ridiculous fines for torrenting a movie by ordinary citizens.

The late OpenAI researcher and whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, wrote an excellent article regarding this topic:

https://suchir.net/fair_use.html

IP and copyright exist.

The same megacorps are suing Internet Archive for their collection of 78rpm records. These guys would rather see art orphaned and die.

"Socialist values" is literally the language that China used in announcing this.

Here is a recent article from a Chinese source:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202503/1329537.shtml

Although censorship isn't mentioned specifically, it is definitely 99% of what they are focused on (the other 1% being scams).

China practices Rule by law, not Rule of law, so you know...they'll know its bad when they see it, so model providers will exercise extreme self censorship (which is already true for social network providers).

Anyways, one of the things about growing up is realizing that there is more to the world than just innovation.

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/music-artists-make-12-...

/largest_company

It's going to be a threat to my career, soon enough — but the threat it poses to me exists even if it never read any of my blog posts or my github repos. Even if it had never read a single line of ObjC or Swift.

> Do we need to spell out that these systems aren't human artists simply looking at paintings and admiring features about them?

In a word, yes.

In more words: explain what it would take for an AI to count as a person — none of what you wrote connects with what was in the comment you replied to.

You dismiss AI as "python": would it help if the maths was done as the pure linear amplification range of the quantum effects in transistors?; you dismiss them as "sucking in pixels from anywhere they can find them" like humans don't spend all day with their eyes open; you complain "corporations with billion dollar valuations to increase investor/shareholder value at the expense of the people who provided the artwork to train the systems" like this isn't exactly what happens with government funded education of humans.

I anticipate that within my lifetime it will be possible for a human brain to be preserved on death, scanned, and the result used as a full brain sim that remembers what the human remembered at the the time of death. Would it matter if the original human had memorised Harry Potter end-to-end and the upload could quote it all perfectly? Would Rowling get the right to delete that brain upload?

I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing mouse neurons on electrode grids to train them to play video games. It's entirely plausible, given the current rate of progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be encoded onto a brain organoid the size of a living mouse's brain — does it magically become OK then? And in 30 years, that same thing as an implant into a human?

The threat to my economic prospects is already present in completely free models whose weights are given away and cannot avail the billion-dollar corporations who made them. I can download free models and run them on my laptop, outputting tokens faster than I can read them for an energy budget lower than my own brain, corporations who made those models don't profit directly by me doing this, and if those corporations go bankrupt I can still run those models.

The risk to my economic value is not because any of these "stole" anything, but because the models are useful and cheap.

GenAI art (and voice) is… well, despite the fact I will admit to enjoying it privately/on free content, whenever I see it on products or blog posts, or when I hear it in the voices on YouTube videos, it's a sign the human behind it has zero budget and therefore whatever it is I don't want to buy it. People already use it because it's cheap, it's a sign of being cheap, signs of cheap are a proxy of generally poor quality.

But that's not going to save my career, nobody's going to decide to boycott all iPhone apps that aren't certified "made by 100% organic grass-fed natural humans with no AI assistance".

So believe me, I get that it's scary. But the arguments you're using aren't good ones.

If states couldn't regulate interstate commerce taking place in their own states, they effectively couldn't regulate any commerce because court decisions have found that essentially all economic activity, even growing food for your own consumption, falls under the banner of interstate commerce.

If it's a car they own, they (should) have the ability to override the AI system and avoid the accident (ignoring nuances) - therefore owning responsibility.

If it's a Taxi they would be in a position where they can't interfere with the operation of the system - therefore the taxi company owns the responsibility.

Rightly or wrongly, this model of intervention capability is what that I'd use to answer these types of questions.

> not just OpenAI but any service that uses LLM APIs or open models

Part of this tension arises out of a social understanding: we want competition precisely because we value the way it keeps an industry/nation "alive" --- there will be "winners and losers"--- and yet we also want to balance that with a coherent idea of ownership such that it's not just a complete lawless free-for-all. In other words, we don't want intellectual property to be too strong because it's economically and culturally stultifying.

Business interests naturally seek the complete nullification of competition, so they promote as strong as possible copyright protections; while the vox populi understands that common culture is the primordial goo that all intellectual property arises out of and returns to and finds copyright at base rather arbitrary. The legal, political, and social, understanding of copyright we have has arisen out of balancing these competing interests (themselves in productive competition) understanding that finding the right balance is precisely what has made a country like America, for example, so successful.

That the balance seems so out of whack in the direction of large and monopoly seeking business suggests the ways in which large business interests exerts undo influence on the legal and political landscape.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-intellectual-pro...

So I'm not sure that it would really change the status quo for a different group of already rich people to profit off of art created largely by the working poor and owned largely by another group of already rich people.

I guess if you think the government can accomplish what you propose, sure. But seems like that's not going to happen. Except maybe in China, and it sounds like that might be even worse for everyone.

Thus, it really seems like there's a solid point here that abandoning copyright to allow private investors to get rich stealing art from other rich people who really just stole it from poor people anyways is better than not doing that.

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/14/nx-s1-5258952/new-york-times-...

They didn't even consider doing this before. They still, as far as I know, haven't paid a dime for any book, or art beyond stock photography.

Lawsuit is still ongoing, if openai loses it might spell doom for legal production and usage of LLMs as a whole. There isn't enough open, free data out there to make state of the art AI.

Can you tell me the specific number of dollars that would be?

I interpreted "pay the price of each copyrighted work" as the sale price, a criticism of things like meta's piracy.

If there was a mandatory licensing regime that AI could use, and there was an exact answer for what the payment would be, I think it might make sense to use "the price" to talk about that license. But right now in today's world it's very confusing to use "the price" to talk about a hypothetical negotiation that has not happened yet, where many many works would never have a number available.

How do for-profit models served by for-profit companies make information that was previously "pay to learn" more accessible?

Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you could game the training. Like have as much of the process happen via public domain sources or pay-once licenses. That would cover a lot of the fundamental knowledge and processes. Then you could fine-tune on copyrighted data. That might actually make it easier to see how much influence on the final weights that content has, but is also would probably be a lot less influence. There's a big difference between a painting of an apple being the main contribution to the concept of "apple" in an image model, vs mention of that painting corresponding to a few weights that just reference a bunch of other concepts that were learned via open data.

It would be easier to negotiate a fixed cost on using a particular datum per training of a model.

I don't recall Biden reading off a price sheet for a single corporation. Seems a bit different than what happened yesterday the White House.

Forget what they called it, united something or other.

Generally speaking, every point of centralization is also a point where a lot of power can be acquired with relatively little resources. So regardless of intent, it attracts people who are into power, and over time, they take over. The original intent often remains symbolically and in the rhetoric used, but when you look beyond that into the actual policies, they are increasingly divorced from what is actually claimed.

Over a long period of time the interest of the powerful will always win. There is a reason if no government (whether left or right) can fix the situation and inequality between the top 0.01% and the rest keeps increasing.

The only solution to maximise wellbeing for individuals is to reduce the amount of control the powerful can exert on the rest of society.

That's what we're getting with "democracy" because ultimately swaying the opinion of a lot of people (in this technological time) requires money. No wonder the powerful elite or their puppets end up making decision for the majority.

No, what I advocate for is for decentralisation of power, I don't want any central entity making choices for me.

Someone with capital should be able to offer to buy me out but they shouldn't be able to tax me or decide what happens to me or my property.

Das kapital, as a critique to Smith's writing.

Communist manifesto, to understand the point of the laborer, and not capital.

Read about worker cooperatives and democracy in the workplace, including Mondragon corp in Spain.

(One of the largest problems we have with any economic system is that none can properly model infinites. The cost of creating new is expensive be it art or science. But cost of copying is effectively 0. I can highlight the problem, but I have no good solution. But OpenAI's response is 'let us ignore copyright law' which wrongs creators.)