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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

If I stole all veggies from your garden but spent time/money/effort making a meal, I should at minimum share it with you for free, no?

Yes, and that's exactly my point. We are in violent agreement. It's shared with me, with you, with OP, and with everybody else. We can get a delicious meal for free or we can pay somebody else to serve us a slightly-tastier version.

Here, disregarding copyright law has fulfilled the very purpose of copyright law: to advance the useful arts and sciences. Copyright law was the best tool we had to accomplish that before, and now we have something better.

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I wouldn’t be happy if those companies used my vegetables to open a Michelin star restaurant, even if I got a free McDouble out of the deal.

Plant based I guess I don’t know metaphors are hard.

But the McDouble isn't an adequate comparison. Yes, the companies who opened Michelin-rated restaurants with the food they stole from your garden are giving you McDonalds'-level food for free and charging for the rest. Meanwhile, some other companies who raided your garden are giving you the plant-based equivalent of Ruth's Chris or Fogo de Chão for free.

The other thing is, after they stole all that stuff from your garden, it was somehow still there. Your neighbors on Hacker News say that some bandits raided your garden, but you can plainly see that no one has picked any fruit or uprooted any plants, and your security cameras reveal nothing more rapacious than a rabbit or two. You begin to suspect that your neighbors are gaslighting you.

The plant metaphor breaks down when you pause, take a breath, put the McDouble down and realize that intellectual property is a completely different ownership concept than physical property.

Exactly. Plants, like flames, reproduce themselves.

Technically most flowering plants need an intermediary for pollination

The best kind of correct!

But the AI companies are not publishing the models? Moreover they are charging for access to the models.

Sure they are. Surf around on HuggingFace and you'll see dozens of open-weight models up to 120B parameters in size from for-profit US companies, freely downloadable (if not freely runnable, alas). Probably hundreds of them, at this point.

And a 3T parameter model is scheduled to be dropped by the Chinese on Monday.

They should certainly publish more, and if somebody were to argue that model weights trained by scraping copyrighted data should inherently be accessible to everyone, I'd be 100% in favor of that.

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