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AI is a business model stress test

dri.es

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Re: AI is a business model stress test

#21

Post by heliumtera »

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs.

There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Improving accessibility to compute power would hurt Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Improving control and freedom over your device would hurt apple and Google.

Why should we be sympathetic to the middleman again?

If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. See the irony?

"Give everything away for free and this people will leave technology", geohot said something like this and I truly appreciate. Technology will heal finally

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#22

Post by tazjin »

jsheard wrote: post #20
tazjin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know of active work happening on such a license?

Writing the license is the easy part, the challenge is in making it legally actionable. If AI companies are allowed to get away with "nuh uh we ran it through the copyright-b-gone machine so your license doesn't count" then licenses alone are futile, it'll take lobbying to actually achieve anything.

Huh? Clearly writing it is not easy, as per your own comment

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#23

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #9
johnpaulkiser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published. This feels like the simplest & best single regulation that can be applied in this industry.

It'd substantially reduce the incentive for the training of new models.

That's a good thing if it means it would reduce the incentive for mega corps to steal other people's work.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#24

Post by theropost »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

I think there is a real issue here, but I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books. The bigger problem is incentives. We built a system where writing docs, tutorials, and open technical content paid off indirectly through traffic, subscriptions, or services. LLMs get a lot of value from that work, but they also break the loop that used to send value back to the people and companies who created it.

The Tailwind CSS situation is a good example. They built something genuinely useful, adoption exploded, and in the past that would have meant more traffic, more visibility, and more revenue. Now the usage still explodes, but the traffic disappears because people get answers directly from LLMs. The value is clearly there, but the money never reaches the source. That is less a moral problem and more an economic one.

Ideas like GPL-style licensing point at the right tension, but they are hard to apply after the fact. These models were built during a massive spending phase, financed by huge amounts of capital and debt, and they are not even profitable yet. Figuring out royalties on top of that, while the infrastructure is already in place and rolling out at scale, is extremely hard.

That is why this feels like a much bigger governance problem. We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way. I am not sure our policies or institutions are ready to catch up to that reality yet.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#25

Post by hk__2 »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

Do I have to publish my book for free because I got inspiration from 100's of other books I read during my life?

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#26

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

bob1029 wrote: post #3
techblueberry wrote: post #2

This feels like the OpenSSL problem where we do probably need some kind of industry organization to maintain these things. There’s a chicken and the egg problem that these AI companies need someone to keep maintaining tailwind if they want it to keep working in their prompts. Maybe that limits the ability for the head of tailwind to run their own business and make more income, but something gotta give.

> we do probably need some kind of industry organization to maintain these things. In the case of CSS, we already have that: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html

Are you saying the www consortium should be paying to keep Tailwind development and maintenance going? The css standard is not the same as a usable library of components.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#27

Post by hoppp »

tazjin wrote: post #11
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

Does anyone know of active work happening on such a license?

I got an

"LLM Inference Compensation MIT License (LLM-ICMIT)"

A license that is MIT compatible but requires LLM providers to pay after inference, but only restricts online providers, not self-hosted models

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#28

Post by blibble »

hk__2 wrote: post #25
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

Do I have to publish my book for free because I got inspiration from 100's of other books I read during my life?

false equivalence because machines are not human beings

a lossy compression algorithm is not "inspired" when it is fed copyrighted input

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#30

Post by jsheard »

tazjin wrote: post #22
jsheard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing the license is the easy part, the challenge is in making it legally actionable. If AI companies are allowed to get away with "nuh uh we ran it through the copyright-b-gone machine so your license doesn't count" then licenses alone are futile, it'll take lobbying to actually achieve anything.

Huh? Clearly writing it is not easy, as per your own comment

My point is that you could write the most theoretically bulletproof license in the world and it would count for nothing under the precedent that AI training is fair use, and can legally ignore your license terms. That's just not a problem that can be solved with better licenses.
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