I kind of get their overall point, even if it is ironic that Oracle is all in on AI. They don’t want a ton of contributions to review that weren’t made with care, adding burden to, as they put it: “already limited time of human reviewers”. Especially for a project that runs to many major businesses, this could pose a massive risk.
> even if it is ironic that Oracle is all in on AI Selling it is one thing. Having to use it one's self is quite another.
I know you've heard this one before: "Never get high on your own supply."
I kind of get their overall point, even if it is ironic that Oracle is all in on AI. They don’t want a ton of contributions to review that weren’t made with care, adding burden to, as they put it: “already limited time of human reviewers”. Especially for a project that runs to many major businesses, this could pose a massive risk.
Any way you spin it, the message remains clear --- dealing with AI slop is just too labor intensive and risky. Do as Larry does --- not as Larry claims to do. I would short his stock but it has already lost half it's value over the past year. And his credit rating is one notch above junk. AI is going to make fools out of a lot of billionaires like Larry.
The Oracle AI ban marks the end of the Kayfabe era.
Even the biggest institutional AI investors have to ban their contributors from spamming them with AI generated slop.
> AI to write code with recent verdict over the IP rights of AI generated code. Which recent verdict? > It would be interesting to see how this effects the copyleft Licences with contributors are using AI for the PRs I know Linux and GCC have been diligent about tagging and tracking LLM based contributions. In the worst case they can chuck it all out and handwrite it back.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 There is this old one around contents like images and all, the ripple affect is pretty much everywhere. Its sort of coupled with the recent penalty of $1.5B on Anthropic. The catch 22 is that some portion of the LLM training data can be classified as IP theft. Even though Anthropic has been fined the data still exists and can be used by LLM to generate code for you. So if…
> penalty of $1.5B on Anthropic
Settlement not penalty.
Anthropic will have judged the benefits of the settlement, not just the headline cost. It could have been a strategic move by Anthropic: we can't know without information we don't have. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49014389 1.5B looks like ~2% of funding/income.
You truly envision a future where every program is written in a custom programming language, for a custom operating system, for a single user who will now be in charge of understanding and maintaining it forever? That user being your grandma, your baker, your CEO?
I do. Software as a list of requirements and that's it. The local LLM appliance everybody has taking in a document specifying hardware, interfaces, and requirements and spitting out software changeable locally via conversation with its users. In the same way you have a cookbook with recipes to make dinner instead of ordering out.
Most people don't bake their own bread even if it's more approachable, and cheaper then vibecoding. Bread is just a recipe one may say. But in modern times have we ever witnessed disappearance of specialization? I don't think so.
Policies like this will result in the death of the branded software. As we move forward it will be easier than ever to just maintain and keep your fork of software with the changes you want or need. No more approval, bureaucracy, or arguing. Just tell the AI agent want you want changed and you have it. This will be used for huge things too. Like maybe you want a specific fork of Java that only supports for each itera…
Except. . . (accept)... SaaS solves the problem of needing one piece of software to communicate between multiple (many) users and/or other pieces of software. Can't picture a functioning world where every piece of software is custom and requires factorial amount of AI comparisons and reviews to patch the API to communicate. In fact, it's impossible! There's not enough compute to handle a factorial explosion. I really…
Given how much of the industry is SaaS that would be such a self own! Wow, fantastic, you can build all your software in house, zero dependencies. Wait, your users can do the same? And they don’t need to pay you anymore for any of your cool services because they just asked their agents to recreate your infra from scratch? Interesting, truly the future of humanity
Oracle, the law firm with a tech business attached, probably wants to retain the option to sue other people for AI-washing their proprietary code, and that doesn't work if they're also publicly accepting AI contributions to their code with no apparent concern for the provenance of it. The tech business would probably tell them this isn't going to be a needle they are going to be able to successfully thread, but the l…
Not even a conspiracy theory. Just the most likely explanation.
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' - lawnmower doesn't give a * about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." --Bryan Cantrill
So contributions to OpenJDK have to be hand-written, while internally, Oracle uses AI generated code... I guess the logic is that employees who use AI generated code (theoretically) review their code better? The whole thing still seems a little strange.
No I'm sure they are just paranoid about license rights.
This constitutes an admission on the part of one of the largest AI investors that AI generated/"assisted" code is inadequate (in part) because it is produced in flagrant violation of license rights.
Not even a conspiracy theory. Just the most likely explanation.
It’s been established that LLM-generated code is not copyrighted so I can fully understand the company living from copyrighted data to not accept LLM-generated contributions.
This is a false narrative based on a (IMO often intentional) misunderstanding. It has by no means been established by any court that LLM-generated code is not copyrightable.
Thaler v. Perlmutter stands for a much narrower proposition and at any rate is not binding nationally, SCOTUS having denied certiorari.