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Comment by yuvadam | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's possible to separate any open source contribution from the ones that came before it, as we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Every developer learns from their predecessors and adapts patterns and code from existing projects.

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Exactly that. And all the books about, for instance, operating systems, totally based on the work of others: their ideas where collected and documented, the exact algorithms, and so forth. All the human culture worked this way. Moreover there is a strong pattern of the most prolific / known open source developers being NOT against the fact that their code was used for training: they can't talk for everybody but it is a signal that for many this use is within the scope of making source code available.

> their ideas where collected and documented

Yeah, documented *and credited*. I'm not against the idea of disseminating knowledge, and even with my misgivings about LLMs, I wouldn't have said anything if this blog post was simply "LLMs are really useful".

My comment was in response to you essentially saying "all the criticisms of LLMs aren't real, and you should be uncompromisingly proud about using them".

> Moreover there is a strong pattern of the most prolific / known open source developers being NOT against the fact that their code was used for training

I think it's easy to get "echo-chambered" by who you follow online with this, my experience has been the opposite, i don't think it's clear what the reality is.

If you fork an open source project and nuke the git history, that's considered to be a "dick move" because you are erasing the record of people's contributions.

LLMs are doing this on an industrial scale.

I don't really understand how that isn't allowed/disallowed simply on the basis of whether the licence permits use without attribution?

The hard truth is that if you're big enough (and the original creator is small enough) you can just do whatever you want and to hell with what any license says about it.

To my understanding, the expensive lawyers hired by the biggest people around, filtered through layers of bureaucracy and translated to software teams, still result in companies mostly avoiding GPL code.

I’ve been thinking that information provenance would be very useful for LLMs. Not just for attribution (git authors), but the LLM would know (and be able to control) which outputs are derived from reliable sources (e.g. Wikipedia vs a Reddit post; also which outputs are derived from ideologically-aligned sources, which would make LLMs more personal and subjectively better, but also easier to bias and generate deliberate misinformation).

“Information provenance” could (and I think most likely would, although I’m very unfamiliar with LLM internals) be which sources most plausibly derive an output, so even output that exists today could eventually get proper attribution.

At least today if you know something’s origin, and it’s both obvious and publicly online, you have proof via the Internet Archive.

You can say that about literally everything, yet we have robust systems for protecting intellectual property, anyway.

> I don't think it's possible to separate any open source contribution from the ones that came before it, as we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Every developer learns from their predecessors and adapts patterns and code from existing projects.

Yes but you can also ask the developer (wheter in libera.irc, or say if its a foss project on any foss talk, about which books and blogs they followed for code patterns & inspirations & just talk to them)

I do feel like some aspects of this are gonna get eaten away by the black box if we do spec-development imo.

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