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by Sharlin 367 days ago
No, the inference/training algorithms, being math, are not copyrightable. OP just wrote another implementation. What's copyrighted are the models, which OP did not train from scratch (having neither the training material nor the compute to do that).
4 comments
Zambyte 367 days ago
> What's copyrighted are the models

Has this actually been tested yet? Or are we still at the stage of AI companies trying to pretend this into reality?

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bravesoul2 367 days ago
If the models are copyright protected then presumably they obeyed license on the upstream dependencies they included (i.e. the training data).
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bredren 366 days ago
Is upstream dependency licensure necessary to establish copyright? For example, I Need a Haircut was still a unique work regardless of the rights to sample Alone Again.
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dheera 367 days ago
I mean, if you take a match to a blank CD-ROM, or shoot neutrinos at a USB drive, there is a very small chance that you get the SD weights stored on them
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Zambyte 366 days ago
You can say that about literally any digital information. This isn't really interesting in the context of the copyright status of AI models.
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echelon 367 days ago
We should be specific when we say "models".

The code outlining the network vs. the resultant weights. (Also vs. any training, inference, fine tuning, misc support code, etc.)

The theoretical diagram of how the code networks and modules are connected is math. But an implementation of that in code is copyrightable.

Afaik, the weights are still a grey area. Whereas code is code and is copyrightable.

Weights are not produced by humans. They are the result of an automated process and are not afforded copyright protection. But this hasn't been tested in court.

If OpenAI GPT 4o weights leak, I think the whole world could use it for free. You'd just have to write the code to run them yourself.

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bravesoul2 367 days ago
I use model architecture for the code/math and weights for the weights to avoid confusion!

Then there are hyperparameters which are also needed to be known to use the weights with the model architecture.

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MoonGhost 366 days ago
> I use model architecture for the code/math

Code is copyrightable and math is not. What about 'architecture'?

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bravesoul2 367 days ago
Oh :( wasn't what I thought it would be. Wondered why it wasn't more blown up on HN!
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vrighter 367 days ago
which means he is still in full violation of their license
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