The state of LLM right now is more or less that of a corporate-sanctioned Napster that hasn't (yet) been gutted by litigation. I'm curious to see what kind of more mainstream torrent/Spotify type thing emerges from this after the hype bubble inevitably pops. In the meantime, I suggest not betting the bank on any one major vendor. Copilot, ChatGPT, Llama, etc could all be one good lawsuit away from shutting down. Factor that into the business risk of adoption.
@remanded I'm not equating Napster with Spotify. Napster was a culturally impactful tool that disrupted a highly litigious industry that was charging $20 for a CD. Napster got sued to death, but eventually paved the way for streaming services and bit torrent technology.
LLM services are coming at a time where search engines and websites are clustered with ads and copy edited ad nauseum. While on potentially legally dubious grounds, I'm interested to see the next iteration of things.
Truly open source models trained on public domain or fully owned data require more up front investment but also carry less foreseeable risk than other options. To that end, ARM hardware is momentarily cheap at a time where very little of anything is cheap, so buying some Ampere boxes and having it scrape your own website and data is a pretty good proposition. Whatever LLM service, don't expect it to reliably think or make decisions for you.
OpenAI is a bit more of a question mark in terms of legality, but MS, Meta, and Google are all easily within their legal frame because their are pulling from their own user's data that their users agreed to allow them to use in their EULAs.
Even then, I think the courts are highly likely to find that even Open AI's use of copyrighted material for it's training is sufficiently different that it constitutes Fair Use.
@1dalm Your assertion doesn't make much sense to be. Microsoft Copilot, in its various flavors, is based on OpenAI GPT. Github Copilot also sourced from copy-left sources into a fully proprietary service. It's a matter of time before that eventually plays out in court.
Meta actively markets Llama as open source when it categorically isn't at all by its license terms. It unambiguously doesn't meet OSD.
Well, I doubt that MS would be pouring billions into development and deeply integrating Copilot into both Windows and Office if their lawyers didn't think they were on good ground. MS is known to have some pretty good lawyers.
But, yes, there will be court cases on this in the next few years, and those cases will be appealed, and those appeals will be appealed again. It'll take the better part of a decade before this all settles out. But my personal bet is that Facebook, Google, MS, Apple, Disney, and basically literally every Fortune 500 company in America will come out on top on this one.
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