TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has been secretly using OpenAI’s technology to develop its own competing large language model (LLM). “This practice is generally considered a faux pas in the AI world,” writes The Verge’s Alex Heath. “It’s also in direct violation of OpenAI’s terms of service, which state that its model output can’t be used ‘to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services.’”
I hope this harms OpenAI in their lawsuits somehow. Their argument of “we can train on the output of others, but nobody can train on our output” has no moral foundation. Pick a lane.
Should change its name to closed ai.
I wonder if that clause is legal. It could be argued that it legitimately protects the capital investment needed to make the model. I’m not sure if that’s true, though.
I can’t speak for every jurisdiction, but I’d be hard pressed to see why it wouldn’t be legal in the US, especially in these circumstances. ByteDance is a massive legally sophisticated corporation, so they should’ve been expected to fully read and understand the terms and conditions before accepting them. They probably won’t bring a legal challenge, because they know they don’t have a particularly strong legal argument or a sympathetic angle to use.
The issue is that what they are doing there is blatantly anticompetitive.
Sorry for the late reply, but this doesn’t really seem like it’d come close to invoking any of the US’s neutered antitrust enforcement. Open AI doesn’t have a monopoly position to abuse, since there are other large firms offering LLMs that see reasonable amounts of usage. This clause amounts more to an effort to stop reverse engineering than stifle anyone trying to build an LLM.
A lot of open source models are trained using data from gpt outputs actually. It’s a cheap way to generate huge training data. The difference is those models are made by independent researchers not backed by a huge company for commercial purpose so OpenAI probably left them alone.
Probably an honest mistake. Who hasn’t bent down to tie their shoe, lost their balance and accidentally coded up a LLM to steal from an existing product? I’d still trust them to plant listening devices, cameras and keyloggers in my pocket since they’ve displayed such a commitment to honesty, integrity and transparency.
Yes, honestly you have also been a subject of a lot of propaganda. The US and the US media are villifying a lot of Chinese companies while American companies are not much better if not worse.
