[DennisP]

Normal software is copyrighted. Model weights don't seem to be copyrighted, as another comment pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073127

If weights aren't copyrighted then there's no IP to license, other than the bit of software that runs the whole thing and it's probably not too hard to write that yourself. There might even be open source reimplementations soon.

Lots of companies are willing to push the boundaries of IP when there's a gray area. One example is Google's implementation of a Java API when they made Android, for which they got sued, and won their case. Another example is the AI companies training their models on copyrighted material.

[throwaway27448]

I'm at a bit of a loss here—is copyright formed around semantics rather than text? What are the constraints of matching these semantics?

[DennisP]

From the other comment:

> this was partially tested last year in Thaler v. Perlmutter which affirmed that copyright requires human authorship

Model weights are not authored by humans. Neither is AI output, which is why that's not copyrighted either. In another realm, a famous photo taken by a monkey was deemed by the courts to be free of copyright.