Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is a business model stress test

dri.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 361 posts

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#61

Post by delfinom »

cogman10 wrote: post #14
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.

> if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published. The problem here is enforcement. It's well known that AI companies simply pirated content in order to train their models. No amount of license really helps in that scenario.

The problem here is "money".

The AI goldrush has proven that intellectual property laws are null and void. Money is all that matters.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#63

Post by dnw »

I'd note a couple of things:

Not to nitpick but if we are going to discuss the impact of AI, then I'd argue "AI commoditizes anything you can specify." is not broad enough. My intuition is "AI commoditizes anything you can _evaluate/assess_." For software automation we need reasonably accurate specifications as input and we can more or less predict the output. We spend a lot of time managing the ambiguity on the input. With AI that is flipped.

In AI engineering you can move the ambiguity from input to the output. For problems where there is a clear and cheaper way of evaluating the output the trade-off of moving the ambiguity is worth it. Sometimes we have to reframe the problem as an optimization problem to make it work but same trade-off.

On the business model front: [I am not talking specifically about Tailwind here.] AI is simply amplifying systemic problems most businesses just didn't acknowledge for a while. SEO died the day Google decided to show answer snippets a decade ago. Google as a reliable channel died the day Google started Local Services Advertisement. Businesses that relied on those channels were already bleeding slowly; AI just made it sudden.

On efficiency front, most enterprises could have been so much more efficient if they could actually build internal products to manage their own organizational complexity. They just could not because money was cheap so ROI wasn't quite there and even if ROI was there most of them didn't know how to build a product for themselves. Just saying "AI first" is making ROI work, for now, so everyone is saying AI efficiency. My litmus test is fairly naive: if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#64

Post by wnjenrbr »

iterateoften wrote: post #47
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 stopped writing open source projects on github because why put a bunch of work into something for others to train off of without any regard for the original projects

Good, we don’t want code that people are possessive of, in the software commons. The attitude that you are concerned about what people do with your output means that nobody should touch your output, too big a risk of drama.

We don’t own anything we release to the world.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#65

Post by user432678 »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #41
blibble wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

false equivalence because machines are not human beings a lossy compression algorithm is not "inspired" when it is fed copyrighted input

> lossy compression algorithm is not "inspired" when it is fed copyrighted input That's exactly what happens when you read. Copyrighted input fed straight into your brain, a lossy storage and processing machine.

Following your analogy, parrots should be considered human.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#66

Post by bwfan123 »

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.

> This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP

And as a result of this, the models will start consuming their own output for training. This will create new incentives to promote human generated code.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#67

Post by [deleted] »

antirez wrote: post #39

> You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. This is completely wrong. Agents will not just be able to write code, like they do now, but will also be able to handle operations, security, continuing to check, and improve the systems, tirelessly.

[deleted]

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#68

Post by [deleted] »

LPisGood wrote: post #52
eddd-ddde wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lossy compression algorithm is not "inspired" when it is fed copyrighted input That's exactly what happens when you read. Copyrighted input fed straight into your brain, a lossy storage and processing machine.

I think it’s a pretty easy principle that machines are not people and people learning should be treated differently than machines learning

[deleted]

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#69

Post by delusional »

theropost wrote: post #24
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 comp…

> We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way.

It does not "create value" it harvests value and redirects the proceeds it accrues towards its owners. The business model is a middleman that arbitrages the content by separating it from the delivery.

Software licensing has been broken for 2 decades. That's why free software isn't financially viable for anybody except a tiny minority. It should be. The entire industry has been operating by charity. The rich mega corporations have decided they're not longer going to be charitable.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#70

Post by kachapopopow »

ronsor wrote: post #13
kachapopopow wrote: post #12

I know for a fact that all SOTA models have linux source code in them, intentionally or not which means that they should follow the GPL license terms and open-source part of the models which have created derivative works out of it. yes, this is indirectly hinting that during training the GPL tainted code touches every single floating point value in a model making it derivative work - even the tokenizer isn't immune t…

> the tokenizer isn't immune to this A tokenizer's set of tokens isn't copyrightable in the first place, so it can't really be a derivative work of anything.

GPL however, does put restrictions on it, even the tokenizer. It was specifically crafted in a way where even if you do not have any GPL licensed sourcecode in your project, but it was built on top of it you are still binded by GPL limitations.

the only reason usermode is not affected is because they have an exclusion for it and only via defined communication protocol, if you go around it or attempt to put a workaround in the kernel guess what: it still violates the license - point is: it is very restrictive.

Post reply on HN