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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#431

Post by visarga »

abecedarius wrote: post #352
nerpderp82 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use neural indexes to find the code that most closely matches the output. Explainable AI should be able to tell you where the autocompletion results came from, even if it is a weighted set of files.

That's a good idea in theory, but the smarter the agent gets, the less direct the derivation and the harder to explain it (and to check the explanation). We're already a long way from a nearest-neighbor model. Yet the equivalent problem for humans gets addressed by the clean-room approach. This seems unfair.

> the smarter the agent gets, the less direct the derivation and the harder to explain it

at some point it should be different enough to stand on its own, right? then we have no problem with copyrights

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#432

Post by visarga »

vharuck wrote: post #361
not2b wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or: they used the entire open source corpus because they thought it was free for the taking, and when people point out that it is not (that there are licenses) they spin that (claim that only 0.1% of output is directly copied, but that would mean 100 lines in 100k program) and pass any risk onto the user (saying it is their responsibility to vet any code they produce). So they aren't saying that users are in the clea…

>saying it is their responsibility to vet any code they produce But, if some of the code produced is covered by copyright, isn't Microsoft in trouble for distributing software that distributes copyrighted code without a license? How would it be different from giving out bootlegs DVDs and trying to avoid blame by reminding everyone that the recipients don't own the copyright?

this complicated copyright problem shows we're still using last century concepts on new and emerging technology that surpassed it; it's time to think hard about it because we need neural nets and they need training data

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#433

Post by visarga »

jonathankoren wrote: post #320
yunohn wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 100 lines in 100k program The intention is autocomplete boilerplate, not write a kernel.

This is not a difference in kind. Autocomplete, do you have anything to say to the commenter ? “This isn’t the best thing to say.”

Coding a snippet is not different in kind from designing a Kernel? It's the difference between tactics and strategy.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#434

Post by visarga »

throwawayboise wrote: post #353
klipt wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you work on an open source project and learn some techniques from it, and then in your day job you use a similar technique, is that a copyright violation? Basically does reading GPL code pollute your brain and make it impossible to work for pay later? If so you should only ever read BSD code, not GPL.

> Basically does reading GPL code pollute your brain and make it impossible to work for pay later? It seems to me that some people believe it does. Some of the "clean room" projects specifically instructed developers to not even look at GPL code. Specific examples not at hand.

I start seeing Ballmer's point of view. It's like cancer.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#435

Post by visarga »

contextfree wrote: post #416
quanticle wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? Why should it be impossible? Arguing that it's impossible for an AI to outperform a human on almost all tasks is like arguing that it's impossible for flying machines to outperform birds. There's nothing magical going on in our heads. It's just a set of chemical gradients and electrical signals that result in us doing or thinking particular things. Why can't we de…

"Why can't we design a computer that does everything we do... only faster?" I think the key word in that sentence might be "we". That is, you could hypothesize that while it's possible in principle for such a computer to exist, it might be beyond what humans and human civilization are capable of in this era. I don't know if this is true or not, but it's kind of intuitively plausible that it's difficult for a designer…

> it's difficult for a designer to design something as complex as the designer themselves

AlphaGo ... hello? It beat its creators at Go, and a few months later the top players. I don't think supervised learning can ever surpass its creators in generalization capability, but RL can.

The key ingredient is learning in an environment, which is like a "dynamic dataset". Humans discovered science the same way - hypothesis, experiment, conclusion, rinse and repeat, all possible because we had access to the physical environment in all its glory.

It's like the difference between reading all books about swimming (supervised) and having a pool (RL). You learn to actually swim from the water, not the book.

A coding agent's environment is a compiler + cpu, pretty cheap and fast compared to robotics which require expensive hardware and dialogue agents which can't be evaluated outside their training data without humans in the loop. So I have high hopes for its future.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#436

Post by visarga »

runarberg wrote: post #382
quanticle wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing that machines will be more efficient than human brains. A airplane isn't more efficient than a goose. But airplanes do fly faster, higher and with more cargo than any flock of geese could ever carry. Similarly, there is no contradiction between AI being less efficient than a human brain, and AI being preferable to humans because it can deal with data sets that are two or three orders of magnitude too…

Even so, such AI doesn’t exist. All the AIs that exist today operate by fitting data. And to be able to perform a useful task it has to have well defined parameters and fit the data according to them. I’m not sure an AI that operates outside of these confinements have even been conceived of. To make an AI that outperforms humans in any task has not been proven to be possible (to my knowledge) not even in theory. An a…

The second time around is easier. The hard part was evolution, took billions of years, used huge resources and energy, but in a single run it evolved nature and humans. AI agents can rely on humans to avoid the enormous costs of blind evolution at least until they reach parity with us, then they have to pay the price and do extreme open-ended learning (solving all imaginable tasks, trying all strategies, giving up on simple objectives).

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#437

Post by giansegato »

nmfisher wrote: post #121
giansegato wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feature is effectively impossible to replicate. Only Microsoft positioned itself to have: - dataset (GitHub) - tech (openai) - training (azure) - platform (vscode) I'm impressed. They did an amazing job from a corporate strategy standpoint. Also directionally things are getting interesting

I actually don't think there's much of a moat here at all. GitHub repositories are open for the taking, GPT-XXX is cloneable (mostly, anyway) and VS Code is extensible. They definitely have a good head-start, but I really don't think there's anything here that won't be generally available within 2 years.

I don't think that GH code is easily accessible, with rate limiting and TOS forbidding it. GPT is an open model (for the most part), but its training cost is in the order of tens of millions of $

I can think of no one but a handful of companies being able to compete there. And they won't be ok with extending a Microsoft IDE, nor breaking GitHub TOS.

When you start competing on R&D costs the game changes.

There's always the chance that training costs will significantly decrease. But even at an order of magnitude less (ie. tens of Ks) it's still beyond reach for open projects and indie devs

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#438

Post by zelphirkalt »

6510 wrote: post #377
laurent92 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about co-pilot is that it will suggest to do the same mistakes as in other software. If you accept all autosuggestions in C++ you might end up with Windows.

And eventually you will be forced to do it the way everyone does it.

An imaginary conversation between a real developer and some kind of managing person:

"Why are you typing all this stuff by hand? All your coworkers are much more efficient by using the AI!"

"But I need to actually understand ..."

"You should get more efficient! Look at how much time this costs us."

"Yeah but they are copying in mistakes from ..."

"No, the system works! Just do it like everyone else does it and do not waste more time!"

Or at the next code interview ...

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#439

Post by zelphirkalt »

visarga wrote: post #432
vharuck wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>saying it is their responsibility to vet any code they produce But, if some of the code produced is covered by copyright, isn't Microsoft in trouble for distributing software that distributes copyrighted code without a license? How would it be different from giving out bootlegs DVDs and trying to avoid blame by reminding everyone that the recipients don't own the copyright?

this complicated copyright problem shows we're still using last century concepts on new and emerging technology that surpassed it; it's time to think hard about it because we need neural nets and they need training data

Some are more equal than others though, aren't they? I mean, if MS throws out licensed code from others, as if to say: "Ahh, software licensing, such an outdated concept ..." but then keeps its own code out of that loop. "Yeah, but that's our own code, no one is allowed to copy that!"

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#440

Post by eterevsky »

I don't think anyone is interested in stealing small code snippets. It's easy enough to rewrite them. Where GPL does matter is in complete products. In other words, it's never "if only we could use this GCL-licensed function", it's almost always "if only we could link this GPL-licensed library or executable".

And this GitHub co-pilot in no way infringes on full codebases.

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