GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering? • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#421

Post by monocasa » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

otterley wrote: post #420

monocasa wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has a set of patents on certain types of highlighting frequency domain patterns in MRIs. In a lot of ways recurrent neural networks can be frequency domain feature extractors as the backwards data flows create sort of delay line memories tapped at interesting periods. The MRI manufacturers after refusing to license his patents, heavily invested in ML models that focus on using recurrent networks for frequency doma…

You can't patent a concept. You can only patent a process, a machine, an article of manufacture, or a composition of matter. And the invention must be described sufficiently such that a practitioner skilled in the relevant art can reproduce the subject matter.

You can patent a software process or machine running classes of software in the US as long as it doesn't conflict with Alice Corp's test which is analogous to what I mean by concept in this case. And his patents are extremely well documented in the patents so that they can be reproduced. I guess if someone manually cranked through the math for each video's set of pixels they wouldn't be infringing, but oncologists aren't really ok with waiting a year for results. Any practical implementation would be infringing.

And like I said, I'm pretty anti US structures around intellectual property (including software patents), but I'm not for the only ones being able to circumvent the legal process being entities with large banks of capital.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#422

Post by justshowpost » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 2:18 AM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #177

belter wrote: post #101

One interesting aspect, that I thing will make it difficult for GitHub to argue and justify its not a a license violation would be the answer to the following question: Was Copilot trained using Microsoft internal source code or will it be in the future ? As GitHub is a Microsoft company and OpenAI although a non-profit just got a massive one billion investment from Microsoft (presumably not for free), will it start…

Alternatively, wait for co-pilot to add support for C++, then start writing an operating system with Win32-compatible API using co-pilot. There is plenty of leaked Windows source code on Github, so chances are that co-pilot would give quite good suggestions for implementing a Win32-compatible kernel. Then watch and see if Microsoft will try to argue that you are violating their copyright using code generated by their…

There is also ancient Cisco IOS too.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#423

Post by toss1 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 2:26 AM UTC

gradys wrote: post #123

toss1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the original commenter said, you have the capability for abstract learning, thought, zand generalized learning, which the "AI" lacks. It is not uncommon to ask person to "explain in your own words..." - as in use your own abstract internal representation of the learned concepts to demonstrate that you have developed such an abstract internal concept of the topic, and are not merely regurgitating re-disorganized in…

The AI most certainly does not lack the ability to generalize. Not as well as humans, but generalization is the key interesting result in deep learning, leading to papers like this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05468 The ability to generalize actually seems to keep increasing with the number of parameters, which is the key interesting result in the GPT-* line of work that Copilot is based on.

I've seen some very clever output from GPT-*, but zero indicating any kind of abstract generalized understanding of any topic in use.

Being able to predict the most likely succeeding string for a given input can be extremely useful. I've even used it with some success as a more sophisticated kind of search engine for some materials science questions.

But I'm under no illusions that it has the first shadow of a hint of minor understanding of the topics of materials science, nevermind any general understanding.

It seems we're discussing different meanings of the word "generalize".

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#424

Post by jagger27 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 2:39 AM UTC

seedless-sensat wrote: post #388

jagger27 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 0,01 will be super rich. By definition, that has always been true. We have been in the endgame for a very long time.

A percentile doesn't dictate the shape of the bell curve. The parent comment could be suggesting the tail is getting longer.

That’s fair.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#425

Post by whoisthemachine » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

akerl_ wrote: post #133

belter wrote: post #101

One interesting aspect, that I thing will make it difficult for GitHub to argue and justify its not a a license violation would be the answer to the following question: Was Copilot trained using Microsoft internal source code or will it be in the future ? As GitHub is a Microsoft company and OpenAI although a non-profit just got a massive one billion investment from Microsoft (presumably not for free), will it start…

Without weighing in on the overall question of “is this a license violation”, you’ve created a false dichotomy. “GitHub included Microsoft proprietary code in the training set because they view the results as non-derivative” and “GitHub didn’t include Microsoft proprietary code because they view the results as derivative” are clearly not the only options. They could have not included Microsoft internal code because i…

They could have just used their own open source code, of which they now have plenty, in many languages.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#426

Post by c1ccccc1 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 3:01 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #53

gutino wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the rate of product/services that machinery will produce will make that even a small tax to corporations producing everything autonomously will be enough to feed and give a quality of life to everyone with an UBI or partial time jobs. You really want to push for high productivity across all industries, even if that means sacrificing jobs in the short term, because history demonstrated after that, new and more hum…

Every decade was supposed to see fewer hours working for higher pay and quality of life. It didn't happen, as business owners (not just 1% fat cats, the owners of mom and pop shops are at least as guilty as anyone, they just sucked at scaling their avarice). So the claim that this technological revolution will be different and that it will result in a broad social safety net, universal basic income, and substantive,…

I'd agree that many business owners are blameworthy (specifically the ones who have sought monopolies for their product or monopsonies for their labour supply), but we shouldn't forget landlords. A huge fraction of people's income goes to paying rent, especially in urban areas, yet the property tax is relatively low. This leaves a fat profit margin for landlords, even subtracting off the capital cost of the building. The proliferation of "single family house" zoning hasn't helped either. Preventing the construction of high density housing drives up rents, and benefits landlords at the cost of everyone else.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#427

Post by cbsmith » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

thundergolfer wrote: post #8

Attempts to litigate any license violation are going to get precisely nowhere I bet, but I find the actual license violation argument persuasive. This is an excellent example of how the AI singularity/revolution/whatever is a total distraction and that a much bigger and more serious issue is how AI is becoming so effective at turning the output of cheap/free human mental labour into capital. If AI keeps getting bette…

> I find the actual license violation argument persuasive.

I'm curious as to why it seems persuasive. Open source licenses largely hinge on restrictions tied to distribution of the software, and training a model does not constitute as distribution.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#428

Post by gdsdfe » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

gdsdfe wrote: post #334

rbarrois wrote: post #239

An interesting impact of this discussion is, for me: within my team at work, we're likely to forbid any use of Github co-pilot for our codebase, unless we can get a formal guarantee from Github that the generated code is actually valid for us to use. By the way, code generated by Github co-pilot is likely incompatible with Microsoft's Contribution License Agreement [1]: "You represent that each of Your Submission is…

How would you know if copilot was used or not?!

I'm not sure why I'm getting down voted? "We'll forbid the use of copilot in our code base" How???? How the fuck would anyone know how the code was written?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#429

Post by alternatetwo » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

skeeter2020 wrote: post #365

belter wrote: post #101

One interesting aspect, that I thing will make it difficult for GitHub to argue and justify its not a a license violation would be the answer to the following question: Was Copilot trained using Microsoft internal source code or will it be in the future ? As GitHub is a Microsoft company and OpenAI although a non-profit just got a massive one billion investment from Microsoft (presumably not for free), will it start…

>> Was Copilot trained using Microsoft internal source code... They explicitly state "public" code so the answer is most certainly "no".

Well, the source of various Windows versions is public on GitHub ...

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#430

Post by edanm » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 5:54 AM UTC

thundergolfer wrote: post #8

Attempts to litigate any license violation are going to get precisely nowhere I bet, but I find the actual license violation argument persuasive. This is an excellent example of how the AI singularity/revolution/whatever is a total distraction and that a much bigger and more serious issue is how AI is becoming so effective at turning the output of cheap/free human mental labour into capital. If AI keeps getting bette…

> This is an excellent example of how the AI singularity/revolution/whatever is a total distraction [...]

Umm, no it's not. It's possible we just have two problems - the economic problem you mention might be correct, but also that people who believe in the problems of the singularity are right as well. The existence of a certain problem doesn't negate the existence of the other problem.