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OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

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Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#491

Post by lucianbr »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #394
crooked-v wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreements with surprise terms that only get detailed later tend not to be very legal.

Doesn't even have to be a surprise. Pretty much startup employment agreement in existence gives the company ("at the board's sole discretion") the right to repurchase your shares upon termination of employment. OpenAI's PPUs are worth $0 until they become profitable. Guess which right they'll choose to exercise if you don't sign the NDA?

Who would accept shares as valuable if the contract said they can be repurchased from you at a price of 0$? This can't be it.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#492

Post by andrepd »

ben_w wrote: post #430
wtallis wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your training process ingests the entire text of the book, and trains with a large context size, you're getting more than just "a handful of word probabilities" from that book.

If you've trained a 16-bit ten billion parameter model on ten trillion tokens, then the mean training token changes 2/125 of a bit, and a 60k word novel (~75k tokens) contributes 1200 bits. It's up to you if that counts as "a handful" or not.

xz can compress the text of Harry Potter by a factor of 30:1. Does that mean I can also distribute compressed copies of copyrighted works and that's okay?

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#494

Post by SXX »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #459

"It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it." I find it hard to understand that in a country that tends to take freedom of expression so seriously (and I say this unironically, American democracy may have flaws but that is definitely a strength) it can be legal to silence someone for the rest of their life.

This is not much worse than "forced arbitration". In US you can literally lose your rights by clicking on "Agree" button.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#495

Post by andrepd »

smt88 wrote: post #333
throwaway598 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That OpenAI are institutionally unethical. That such a young company can be become rotten so quickly can only be due to leadership instruction or leadership failure.

Look at Sam Altman's career and tweets. He's a clown at best, and at worst he's a manipulative crook who only cares about his own enrichment and uses pro-social ideas to give himself a veneer of trustworthiness.

Many easily fooled rubes believe that veneer, so I guess it's working for him.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#496

Post by bryanrasmussen »

kmeisthax wrote: post #405
bluefirebrand wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems absurd that somehow the scale being massive makes it better somehow You would think having a massive scale just means it has infringed even more copyrights, and therefore should be in even more hot water

So, the law has this concept of 'de minimus' infringement, where if you take a very small amount - like, way smaller than even a fair use - the courts don't care. If you're taking a handful of word probabilities from every book ever written, then the portion taken from each work is very, very low, so courts aren't likely to care. If you're only training on a handful of works then you're taking more from them, meaning…

>we also thought sampling in music was de minimus

I would think if I can recognize exactly what song it comes from - not de minimus.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#497

Post by Sharlin »

snovv_crash wrote: post #447
ben_w wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've trained a 16-bit ten billion parameter model on ten trillion tokens, then the mean training token changes 2/125 of a bit, and a 60k word novel (~75k tokens) contributes 1200 bits. It's up to you if that counts as "a handful" or not.

If I invent an amazing lossless compression algorithm such that adding an entire 60k word novel to my blob only increases the size by 1.2kb, does that mean I'm not copyright infringing if I release that model?

How is that relevant? If some LLM were able to regurgitate a 60k word novel verbatim on demand, sure, the copyright situation would be different. But last I checked they can’t, not 60k, 6k, or even 600 words. Perhaps they can do 60 words of some well-known passages from the Bible or other similar ubiquitous copyright-free works.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#498

Post by TeMPOraL »

comfysocks wrote: post #465
PontifexMinimus wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying one person is plagarism. Copying lots of people is research.

True, but if you research lots of sources and still emit significant blocks of verbatim text without attribution, it’s still plagiarism. At least that’s how human authors are judged.

Plagiarism is not illegal, it is merely frowned on, and only in certain fields at that.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#499

Post by [deleted] »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #397
alexpetralia wrote: post #282

If the original agreement offered equity that vests, then suddenly another future agreement can potentially revoke that vested equity? It makes no sense unless somehow additional conditions were attached to the vested equity in the original agreement.

And almost all equity agreements do exactly that - give the company right of repurchase. If you've ever signed one, go re-read it. You'll likely see that clause right there in black and white.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#500

Post by throwaway2037 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #332
mwigdahl wrote: post #290

The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. Based on these companies' arguments that copyrighted material is not actually reproduced by these models, and that any seemingly-infringing use is the responsibility of the user of the model rather than those w…

Clever, but no. The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet ", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case,…

    > LLMs not being copyright laundromats
This a brilliant phrase. You might as well put that into an Emacs paste macro now. It won't be the last time you will need it. And the OP is classic HN folly where programmer thinks laws and courts can be hacked with "this one weird trick".
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