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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?

#501

Post by actionfromafar »

lucianbr wrote: post #491
riehwvfbk wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It can. There are many ways to make the number go to zero.

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

#502

Post by SXX »

bambax wrote: post #482

> All of this is highly ironic for a company that initially advertised itself as OpenAI Well... I know first hand that many well-informed, tech-literate people still think that all products from OpenAI are open-source. Lying works, even in that most egregious of fashion.

This is just Propoganda 101. Call yourself anti-fascist on TV for decade enough times and then you can go indiscriminately kill everyone you call fascist.

Unfortunately Orwellian propoganda works.

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

#503

Post by ben_w »

hansworst wrote: post #439
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.

I think it’s questionable whether you can actually use this bit count to represent the amount of information from the book. Those 1200 bits represent the way in which this particular book is different from everything else the model has ingested. Similarly, if you read an entire book yourself, your brain will just store the salient bits, not the entire text, unless you have a photographic memory. If we take math or co…

I agree with what I think you're saying, so I'm not sure I've understood you.

I think this is all still compatible with saying that ingesting an entire book is still:

> 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

(Though I wouldn't want to make a bet either way on "so courts aren't likely to care" that follows on from that quote: my not-legally-trained interpretation of the rules leads to me being confused about how traditional search engines aren't a copyright violation).

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

#504

Post by [deleted] »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #490
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 the law is not a machine or an algorithm. Intent matters. Training an LLM with the intent of contravening an NDA is just plain . Everyone would still get sued anyway.

[deleted]

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

#505

Post by throwaway2037 »

surfingdino wrote: post #487
KoolKat23 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need to go this far. The word-probabilities are transformative use, a form of fair use and aren't an issue. The specific output at each point in time is what would be judged to be fair use or copyright infringing. I'd argue the user would be responsible for ensuring they're not infringing by using the output in a copyright infringing manner i.e. for profit, as they've fed certain inputs into the model…

MS Word does not actively collect and process all texts for all available sources and does not offer them in recombined form. MS Word is passive whereas the whole point of an LLM is to produce output using a model trained on ingested data. It is actively processing vast amounts of texts with intent to make them available for others to use and the T&C state that the user owns the copyright to the outputs based on work…

First, I agree with nearly everything that you wrote. Very thoughtful post! However, I have some issues with the last sentence.

    > Collateralised Copyright Liability
Is this a real legal / finance term or did you make it up?

Also, I do not follow you leap to compare LLMs to CDOs (collateralised debt obligations). And, do you specifically mean CDO or any kind of mortgage / commercial loan structured finance deal?

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

#506

Post by ben_w »

andrepd wrote: post #492
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.

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?

Can you get that book out of an LLM?

Because that's the distinction being argued here: it's "a handful"[0] of probabilities, not the complete work.

[0] I'm not sold on the phrasing "a handful", but I don't care enough to argue terminology; the term "handful" feels like it's being used in a sorites paradox kind of way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

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

#507

Post by Sharlin »

andrepd wrote: post #492
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.

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?

Incredibly poor analogy. If an LLM were able to regurgitate Harry Potter on demand like xz can, the copyright situation would be much more black and white. But they can’t, and it’s not even close.

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

#508

Post by ein0p »

int_19h wrote: post #456
ein0p wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why it wouldn’t be superhuman if there’s any intelligence at all. It already is superhuman at memory and paying attention, image recognition, languages, etc. Add cognition to that and humans basically become pets. Trouble is nobody has a foggiest clue on how to add cognition to any of this.

It is definitely not superhuman or even above average when it comes to creative problem solving, which is the relevant thing here. This is seemingly something that scales with model size, but if so, any gains here are going to be gradual, not sudden.

I’m actually not so sure they will be gradual. It’ll be like with LLMs themselves where we went from shit to gold in the span of a month when GPT 3.5 came out.

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

#509

Post by throwaway2037 »

rcbdev wrote: post #475
KoolKat23 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need to go this far. The word-probabilities are transformative use, a form of fair use and aren't an issue. The specific output at each point in time is what would be judged to be fair use or copyright infringing. I'd argue the user would be responsible for ensuring they're not infringing by using the output in a copyright infringing manner i.e. for profit, as they've fed certain inputs into the model…

OpenAI is outputting the partially copyright-infringing works of their LLM for profit. How does that square?

You raise an interesting point. If more professional lawyers agreed with you, then why have we not seen a lawsuit from publishers against OpenAI?

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

#510

Post by calvinmorrison »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #500
TeMPOraL wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

But they can, just look at AirBnB, Uber, etc.
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