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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?

#401

Post by jahewson »

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…

Ha ha, but no. For starters, copyright falls under federal law and contacts under state law, so it’s not even possible to make this claim in the relevant court.

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

#402

Post by dorkwood »

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,…

How many sources do you need to steal from for it to no longer be considered stealing? Two? Three? A hundred?

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

#403

Post by KennyBlanken »

xvector wrote: post #309
candiddevmike wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI, possibly in part due to the pursuit of AGI. But as the saying goes, yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

Most existing big tech datacenters use mostly carbon free or renewable energy. The vast majority of datacenters currently in production will be entirely powered by carbon free energy. From best to worst: 1. Meta: 100% renewable 2. AWS: 90% renewable 3. Google: 64% renewable with 100% renewable energy credit matching 4. Azure: 100% carbon neutral [1]: https://sustainability.fb.com/energy/ [2]: https://sustainability.a…

That's not a defense.

If imaginary cloud provider "ZFQ" uses 10MW of electricity on a grid and pays for it to magically come from green generation, that means 10MW of other loads on the grid were not powered by green energy, or 10MW of non-green power sources likely could have been throttled down/shut down.

There is no free lunch here; "we buy our electricity from green sources" is greenwashing bullshit.

Even if they install solar on the roofs and wind turbines nearby - that's still electrical generation capacity that could have been used for existing loads. By buying so many solar panels in such quantities, they affect availability and pricing of all those components.

The US, for example, has about 5GW of solar manufacturing capacity per year. NVIDIA sold half a million H100 chips in one quarter, each of which uses ~350W, which means in a year they're selling enough chips to use 700MW of power. That does not include power conversion losses, distribution, cooling, and the power usage of the host systems, storage, networking, etc.

And that doesn't even get into the water usage and carbon impact of manufacturing those chips; the IC industry uses a massive amount of water and generates a substantial amount of toxic waste.

It's hilarious how HN will wring its hands over how much rare earth metals a Prius has and shipping it to the US from Japan, but ask about the environmental impacts of AI and it's all "pshhtt, whatever".

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

#404

Post by atum47 »

hsdropout wrote: post #177
atum47 wrote: post #163

That's not enforceable, right? I'm not a lawyer, but even I know no contract can strips you out of rights given by the constitution.

Are you referring to the first amendment? If so, this allows you to speak against the government. It doesn't prevent you from entering optional contracts. I'm not making any statement about the morality, just that this is not a 1a issue.

I can understand defamation, but it's hard for me to understand disparagement. If i sign one of those contracts with Coca-Cola and later on I publicly announce that a can of Coca-Cola contains too much sugar. Am I in breach of contract?

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

#405

Post by kmeisthax »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #339
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,…

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 it's not de minimus.

For the record, I got this legal theory from Cory Doctorow[0], but I'm skeptical. It's very plausible, but at the same time, we also thought sampling in music was de minimus until the Second Circuit said otherwise. Copyright law is extremely malleable in the presence of moneyed interests, sometimes without Congressional intervention even!

[0] who is NOT pro-AI, he just thinks labor law is a better bulwark against it than copyright

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

#406

Post by mise_en_place »

Why indeed? But that’s nobody’s business except OpenAI and its former employees. Doesn’t matter if it’s not legally enforceable, or in bad taste. When you enter into a contract with another party, it is between you and the other party.

If there is something unenforceable about these contracts, we have the court system to settle these disputes. I’m tired of living in a society where everyone’s dirty laundry is aired out for everyone to judge. If there is a crime committed, then sure, it should become a matter of public record.

Otherwise, it really isn’t your business.

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

#407

Post by LtWorf »

modeless wrote: post #255
twobitshifter wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have equity in a company and I care about its value, I’m not going to say anything to tank its value. If I sell my equity later on, and then disparage the company, what can OpenAI hope to do to me?

They can sue you into bankruptcy, obviously. Also, what if you can't sell? Selling is at their discretion. They can prevent you from selling some of your so-called "equity" to keep you on their leash as long as they want.

If you can't sell, it's worthless anyway.

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

#408

Post by anigbrowl »

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,…

It's not a copyright violation if you voluntarily provide the training material...

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

#409

Post by KennyBlanken »

thorum wrote: post #37

Extra respect is due to Jan Leike, then: https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498174659715494

> Stepping away from this job has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, because we urgently need to figure out how to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us.

Large language models are not "smart". They do not have thought. They don't have intelligence despite the "AI" moniker, etc.

They vomit words based off very fancy statistics.

There is no path from that to "thought" and "intelligence."

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

#410

Post by renonce »

jimnotgym wrote: post #398

>the company will succeed at developing AI systems that make most human labor obsolete. Hmmmn. Most of the humans where I work do things physically with their hands. I don't see what AI will achieve in their area. Can AI paint the walls in my house, fix the boiler and swap out the rotten windows? If so I think a subscription to chat GPT is very reasonably priced!

I don’t know but once vision AI reacts to traffic conditions accurately within 10ms it’s probably a matter of time before they take over your steering wheel. For other jobs you’ll need to wait for robotics.
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