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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

61–70 of 203 posts

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#61
post #6

The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore. Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes…

100% agree, if we are fair and honorable. In practice, well ... you saw what's been going on with the Epstein files, etc... we are far from being ourselves in a world that's fair and honorable. (I'm not condoning it, I think it's massively trashy to steal code like this then pretend you're the good guy because of some super weird mental gymnastics you're doing)

Completely agree. This isn't practical. It's never going to happen just because of the sheer amount of capital behind LLM companies.

You can do anything rotten, as long as you throw enough money at it.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#62
post #10
post #6

The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore. Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes…

if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement your own things, is that code GPL?

I work with people who literally won't even look at GPL code, because of the risk. So yes, potentially.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#63
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real AI will never be invented, because as AI systems become more capable we'll figure out humans weren't intelligent in the first place, therefore intelligence never existed.

Don't worry, just 10 more data centers & a few more gigawatts will get you there even if the people building the data centers & powerplants are unintelligent & mindless drones. But in any event, I have no interest in religious arguments & beliefs so your time will be better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion to fill whatever void was left by secular education since such people are much more…

I mean, it sounds kinda like you're the one making religious arguments. My response is one mocking how poorly egotistical people deal with the AI effect.

Evolution built man that has intelligence based on components that do not have intelligence themselves, it is an emergent property of the system. It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emergent property of the system. No woo woo needed.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#64
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement your own things, is that code GPL?

If you copy and paste one line from a thousand different GPL projects, is the resulting program GPL? Let's be honest about what's happening here.

It could be. The amount of code you copy doesn't matter, just depends on context and if your work could now be considered derivative.

I said this else where, but I work with people who won't even look at GPL code because of the potential legal entanglements.

Yes let's. Corporations with billions of dollars behind them whole sale stole copy right work and licenced code to train models, and then turned around and sold the result with no attribution or monetary benefit given to the people they stole from. They knew what they were doing and relied on the legal system being slow enough that they could plant a flag in the market before legal challenges killed them.

It's an industry built on theft. By all rights they should have been sued/fined out of existence before it ever got this far. But if you have enough money you can make almost anything legal.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#65
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, just 10 more data centers & a few more gigawatts will get you there even if the people building the data centers & powerplants are unintelligent & mindless drones. But in any event, I have no interest in religious arguments & beliefs so your time will be better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion to fill whatever void was left by secular education since such people are much more…

I mean, it sounds kinda like you're the one making religious arguments. My response is one mocking how poorly egotistical people deal with the AI effect. Evolution built man that has intelligence based on components that do not have intelligence themselves, it is an emergent property of the system. It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emerge…

Me & a few friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon. Our mission is based on sound scientific & engineering principles we have observed on the surface of the planet which allows regular people to scale heights they could not by jumping or climbing. We only need a few trillions of dollars & a sufficiently large wall to support it while we climb up to the moon.

There are lots of other analogies but the moon ladder is simple enough to be understood even by children when explaining how nothing can emerge from inert building blocks like transistors that is not reducible to their constituent parts.

As I said previously, your time will be much better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion b/c they will be much more susceptible to your beliefs in emergent properties of transistors & data centers of sufficient scale & magnitude.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#66
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not, because everyone making these arguments wants people to have some magic sauce so they get to ignore all the rules placed on the "artificial" thing.

If you genuinely believe that you are not above a literal text completion algorithm and do not deserve any more rights than it, that says more about you than anything else.

[flagged]

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#67

> I personally think all of this is exciting. I’m a strong supporter of putting things in the open with as little license enforcement as possible. I think society is better off when we share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it. I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies…

You're putting a lot of responsibility on a license that has several permissive contemporaries. The original BSD license "Net/1" and GPL 1.0 were both published in 1989, while the MIT license has its roots set in "probably 1987" [1] with the release of X11. No doubt, GPL had some influence. But I would hardly single it out as the force that ensured software stayed open. Software stayed open because "information wants…

I’m not saying it’s the only force. But if it wasn’t instrumental what’s your take on the cause of proprietary software dominating until relatively recently?

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#68
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it sounds kinda like you're the one making religious arguments. My response is one mocking how poorly egotistical people deal with the AI effect. Evolution built man that has intelligence based on components that do not have intelligence themselves, it is an emergent property of the system. It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emerge…

Me & a few friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon. Our mission is based on sound scientific & engineering principles we have observed on the surface of the planet which allows regular people to scale heights they could not by jumping or climbing. We only need a few trillions of dollars & a sufficiently large wall to support it while we climb up to the moon. There are lots of other analogies but the…

>friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon

Congratulations, you're working on a space elevator. A few trillion dollars would certainly get us out of the atmosphere, and the amount of advances in carbon nanotube and foam metal would rocket us ahead decades in material sciences. Couple this with massive banks of capacitors and you could probably generate enough electricity for a country by the charge differential from the top to the bottom.

Oh, I get it, you were trying to be clever by saying something ignorant because it makes you feel special as a human rather than make realistic statements for the progress currently being made in the sciences.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#69
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me & a few friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon. Our mission is based on sound scientific & engineering principles we have observed on the surface of the planet which allows regular people to scale heights they could not by jumping or climbing. We only need a few trillions of dollars & a sufficiently large wall to support it while we climb up to the moon. There are lots of other analogies but the…

>friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon Congratulations, you're working on a space elevator. A few trillion dollars would certainly get us out of the atmosphere, and the amount of advances in carbon nanotube and foam metal would rocket us ahead decades in material sciences. Couple this with massive banks of capacitors and you could probably generate enough electricity for a country by the charge di…

I don't think you get it but good luck. I've already spent enough time in this thread & further engagement is not going to be productive for anyone involved.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#70
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, just 10 more data centers & a few more gigawatts will get you there even if the people building the data centers & powerplants are unintelligent & mindless drones. But in any event, I have no interest in religious arguments & beliefs so your time will be better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion to fill whatever void was left by secular education since such people are much more…

I mean, it sounds kinda like you're the one making religious arguments. My response is one mocking how poorly egotistical people deal with the AI effect. Evolution built man that has intelligence based on components that do not have intelligence themselves, it is an emergent property of the system. It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emerge…

>It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emergent property of the system.

Sure, but this ain't it.

Actually, I think LLMs are a step in the wrong direction if we really want to reach true AI. So it actually delays it, instead of bringing us close to true AI.

But LLMs are a very good scam that is not entirely snake oil. That is the best kind of scam.

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