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0 pointswaynesonfire10mo ago0 comments

I just happen do read the Phoenix Technologies wikipedia page a few days ago. This company is known for developing BIOS software for computers. Maybe you've seen their logo when you first turn on your computer.

In early computing, everything was closed sourced. Quoting the wikiepdia page,

To develop a legal BIOS, Phoenix used a clean room design. Engineers read the BIOS source listings in the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual. They wrote technical specifications for the BIOS APIs for a single, separate engineer—one with experience programming the Texas Instruments TMS9900, not the Intel 8088 or 8086—who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code.

The legal team at Phoenix deemed inappropriate to "recall source in their own words" for legal reasons.

My non-legal intuition is that these companies training their models are violating copyright. But, the stakes are too high--it's too big to fail if you will. If we don't do it, then our competitors will destroy us. How do you reconcile that?

0 comments

int_19h10mo ago

You're right that if we want to have usable LLMs at all, there's no way around training them on copyrighted materials. So it has to be allowed, but in a way that compensates the original authors somehow. For example, every model provider has to publicly declare all works used for training, and then all inference providers offering that model have to collect a per-token tax that gets distributed to authors in proportion to their presence in the dataset (by the by, this could also be a way to fund websites like Wikipedia).

But any such arrangement needs to be hammered out by the legislature. As laws are, I think it's pretty clear that infringement is happening.

SoftTalker10mo ago

Perhaps Phoenix just looked at the potential adversary (IBM) and decided to approach the project in an exceedingly cautious way, knowing that IBM could litigate it forever if there were any plausible argument that they "copied" even a line of code.

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