[mlaretallack]

Its very important to understand the "how" it was done. The GPL hands the "compile" step, and the result is still GPL. The clean Room process uses 2 teams, separated by a specification. So you would have to

1. Generate specification on what the system does. 2. Pass to another "clean" system 3. Second clean system implements based just on the specification, without any information on the original.

That 3rd step is the hardest, especially for well known projects.

[microtonal]

So what if a frontier model company trains two models, one including 50% of the world's open source project and the second model the other 50% (or ten models with 90-10)?

Then the model that is familiar with the code can write specs. The model that does not have knowledge of the project can implement them.

Would that be a proper clean room implementation?

Seems like a pretty evil, profitable product "rewrite any code base with an inconvenient license to your proprietary version, legally".

[anilgulecha]

LLM training is unnecessary in what we're discussing. Merely LLM using: original code -> specs as facts -> specs to tests -> tests to new code.

[microtonal]

It is hard to prove that the model doesn't recognize the tests and reproduces the memoized code. It's not a clean room.

[anilgulecha]

1 is claude-code1, outputs tests as text.

2. Dumped into a file.

3. claude-code that converts this to tests in the target language, and implements the app that passes the tests.

3 is no longer hard - look at all the reimplementations from ccc, to rewrites popping up. They all have a well defined test suite as common theme. So much so that tldraw author raised a (joke) issue to remove tests from the project.