points by laggyluke 2 days ago | 0 comments
> the entire body of work is actually based on what the sum of researchers did, even those who failed in their research and didn't publish anything.
I don't really see how this is significantly different from them scraping the entire human knowledge, distilling it into weights and then selling the results.
Sure, this argument is about the _new_ data that researchers feed into the machine voluntarily, but I don't see this distinction as significant.
Not making a moral judgement here, just stating that this is consistent with the way those companies operate in general.
Well, so far those companies offered this distilled human knowledge as part of a service, with all the (unresolved) criticism associated with scraping of other peoples properties.
In this instance they did the next step, created a combined output and are celebrating themselves for the result, inviting others to join.
It's the difference of scraping all books to build a language model from it for sale to others, and outright announcing a new Harry Potter book after extending an offer to JK Rowling to join the press-release.
(and I guess I need to clarify: I don't compare scientific research to writing a novel, I compare the handling of both scenarios)