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Comment by willsmith72 | Hacker News Reader

that option is still available to everyone

to be clear, I'm not saying what they did in scraping to learn was ethical. It wasn't. But I just don't see it as pulling the ladder. The ladder is still there.

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"You can't take code produced by our service to make competing services, but we can take code you produced to compete with your service (i.e. software engineering)" is pulling up the ladder IMO. If they can from-scratch train a model without using human-produced code, I think they're within their rights to stop humans from using their model to compete with them. But if they're training on GitHub/Hugging Face/arXiv/Common Crawl/etc, which certainly includes many open-source repos whose licenses they're violating, I don't think they should be legally allowed to prevent people from using their model to produce code that merely competes with them. They themselves have taken other people's code in order to compete with software engineers.

I hope they get nationalized and either the models are open-sourced or the profits are owned by the public.

I don’t know if you’ve tried to scrape or programmatically download a lot of websites recently! It’s not possible to repeat their data collection process anymore.

maybe i'm just pedantic. it's possible you could only build models like these from scratch until a few years ago for that reason, but isn't that an (illegal,unethical) early mover advantage?

to me ladder pulling would be:

- web scraping for model training becomes illegal, with heavy punitive penalties

- training models above a certain compute threshold requires government licensing

- expensive third-party audits are required before deploying models above a capability threshold

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