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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

There's this sentiment in Germany that if you can't make in industry, you work for the government or - even worse - become a politician. It seems like Mistral took that to the next level; they can't compete so they do lobbying instead.

Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition.

That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully training a competitive foundation model here. The copyright mafia would take your investor's money before you could even finish the first training run (hyperbole.)

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Nobody can compete with trillions of dollars of capital if it’s a race for capital.

Z.ai, Moonshot, Deepseek - which of these spent trillions? Their best models are much stronger than Mistral's, the first two have models that are competitive with the US frontier ones.

Not hating on Mistral here, their latest Mistral Small 4 is quite capable and a very reasonable choice for its cost and size.

I'm not sure about that. Post GFC the ECB printed plenty of cash as well.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECBASSETSW

Is really a compete XOR lobby the government? The AI companies in the US do both, and nobody says "OpenAI can't compete so they do lobbying" or "Anthropoic can't compete so they do lobbying".

In that case, hopefully the copyright mafia will take the money from US and Chinese LLM companies and redistribute it to the people who did the actual work fueling the models, such as myself.

I did not spend 10 years writing (A)GPL code for all of it to be stripped of its license, remixed and sold for profit.

Of course in a truly just world, the LLM companies who took my code without permission would beg with offers of owning a share of them because if I didn't consent their models would have to be destroyed.

Since my work is apparently so valuable that they just have to have it, it should count towards my retirement age too.

I have written a bunch of (A)GPL code too and I'm 100% supportive of AI learning from it.

Great, you have that right.

But it begs the question why you chose (A)GPL instead of a permissive license in the first place. If you are OK with people training and using LLMs on top of your work not giving users the right to inspect and modify, you must have logically been OK with it before. The existence of LLMs or even AI is irrelevant to your position.

Yes, and I generally prefer permissive licenses precisely because of this. Nevertheless, I've also done GPL and AGPL code.

That's my point. You don't care about freedom or user rights and you never did. LLMs don't change that, they just give people like you a way to (for now) legally take without giving back and without respecting the wishes of the people whose work you're building on.

Look at consent in sex and how long it took to make everyone accept it's something you need to have sex with someone. Some places are still not there yet.

I firmly believe using other people's work should require the same level of consent.

Can you prove your work was used in any of these models? And if so what percentage of your work constitutes the model?

> Can you prove your work was used in any of these models?

They admit it themselves. We also know how aggressively they scrape everything they can get their hands on because projects like Anubis[0] exist

> And if so what percentage of your work constitutes the model?

That should absolutely be quantified, yes. My part is tiny but together with other people whose work was taken without consent, we make the vast majority. Last time I napkinned the math, I estimated making the models took 10^12 hours of work (nearly all being scraped public and possibly even private projects), out of which only 10^6 was paid (work by the employees of the LLM companies). So roughly 10^12 remains unpaid.

[0]: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

Sounds like a no.

"They admit it themselves."

"Sounds like a no."

This level of discussion does not belong on HN.

> LLM companies and redistribute it to the people who did the actual work fueling the models, such as myself.

Okay this is a new level of narcissism and gatekeeping, thanks for the laugh.

If you think the belief that people should be rewarded pro productive and useful work is narcissism, then you need to either learn about work or narcissism.

I like the sentiment. Keeps a lot of people out of politics so the few can rob everyone else blind. No no, you don’t want this job it’s for loser hacks only.

they already pivoted to be the EUROPE ai cloud, this is just the natural consequences of cheerleading that

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