They claim fair use in public court but they know full well what they've been doing.
Answering a letter with important questions. LLMs can indeed be disruptive to learning, to be handled with care.
Interesting internal insights. We'll see what comes to pass but things are internally not as bright as they are marketed.
Of course unsurprising. Still it's important to get the proofs out.
Shows some insights into the kerfuffle around the Navier-Stokes recent resolution. The behavior of OpenAI in this affair is ludicrous. In my opinion this is showing research malpractice... Why care about the scientific method when you have a shot at good PR?
It's is badly conducted research for PR purpose? Who would have expected anything different? I wish we'd fund real science instead...
Clearly there's a political project behind the design of those tools. Clearly our industry is lacking enough class consciousness to push back against the "AI overlords" agenda.
Clearly the situation of copyright around LLM uses is complex. It's easy to fall into code which can't be copyrighted if there's not enough human input to produce the work (and keep in mind that "prompting" is likely not enough input). This also raises questions about potential copyright violations. Looks like following the guidelines of the SFC for contributing to Free Software projects is getting especially important.
Very important opinion piece from Cory Doctorow again. The trend was clear of an epistemic crisis brewing and generative AI basically put it on steroids. This is a real blow to our civilisation.
This truly makes me sad... The level of cynicism required to destroy rare books is just beyond me. All this to squeeze the last human made tokens available with no real gain in sight.
The executive summary is good. This is also a nice source of reference papers and studies on the topic. It shows quite well why the work is moving to the harnesses rather than the models. Indeed models probably won't improve much in terms of reliability. It all points once again towards a needed shift of people attention from the shiny toys and towards team practice instead.
Very good opinion piece going back to Naur's and Brook's important papers about software production. It's a sobering take on how LLM can't bring the promised productivity gains. This is not saying it can't bring productivity gains of course but it'll never be as dramatic as what the current hype cycle pushes people to believe.
Interesting policy. I think it strikes a good balance.
Funny, I was using that exact same term recently: "brute-force driven development". It describes fairly well how the harnesses work.
This is a very good declaration and call to actions from the mathematics field. I wish we'd have something well thought out like this for computer science and software engineering as well.
Interesting study which measures our propensity to be more confident while being more wrong when using LLMs to answer questions. Those models really tap into our cognitive bias to mistake linguistic fluency for competence.
If you still don't think data centres have a water consumption problem, especially since the LLM weapon race... Think again.
In other words: the security boundaries of coding agents are very porous and not where you expect. Handle with extreme care until they have a proper security model.
The hardware prices are nuts right now... and there's no end in sight yet.
An illustration of the political and ethical acumen being low in our profession in general and in some (most?) Open Source projects in particular...