I thought this was commonly accepted to be the case that companies which sell access to LLMs are also storing and training on the inputs?

I don't mean this as rhetoric, I did not think many people (except possibly those operating under government contracts, and 'normies' who don't know about these things) were under the belief that their IP was kept secret when they use these services.

Or these customers could just use AWS Bedrock...but their current CEO is an incompetent MBA unable to publicly articulate their biggest advantage, in the context of the current AI usage my companies.

You have access to all the frontier models, but...your inputs are not shared with the model vendors...neither are used to train the next model.

Why am I even doing the Amazon board job for them!??

> OpenAI themselves has admitted a weak version of this (that prompts might inadvertedly end up improving the model). We don't know the extent of this.

I think this is being misunderstood. Codex has a toggle to allow your prompts to be included in training data. They’re saying they can’t be sure if the person had it on or off while using Codex to discuss the work.

They’re not saying that some prompts are mysteriously jumping into training data.

Also, there is a large market for AI services which don’t retain anything under any circumstances for enterprise customers.

Almost every serious customer is already using ZDR where nothing is retained at all, instead of "anonymized" data.

> OpenAI themselves has admitted a weak version of this (that prompts might inadvertedly end up improving the model).

2023:

"The approach also aligned with the company’s broader deployment strategy, to gradually release technologies into the world for people to get used to them. Some executives, including Altman, started to parrot the same line: OpenAI needed to get the “data flywheel” going."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-a... https://archive.is/NmO5P#selection-979.907-979.1177

I don't think this has been a big secret.

Anthropic carried out a multitude of "copyright attacks" on open source repositories, and the broader internet.

If someone really wants to ask a million dollars to let a book be trained on, ok their choice, maybe not getting any customers though. If someone really pays then cool, you deserve it for making what is apparently a very useful book. There are encyclopedias that probably cost more than that to make and would sell for more.

One of the most infamous legal challenges to sampled music was MARRS "Pump Up the Volume" in the 1980s, and that was preceded by other famous cases. Not sure why you think that started in the 1990s.

Lol um no everyone benefits from copyrights and IP. If were being flippant how about people just steal your private code and monetize it!? Copyright makes the creative world turn.

> Make it illegal to transfer ownership of copyrighted work too, only the spouse or one single inheritor who isnt a company can have the rights transferred, after both die, the work enters public domain.

By your phrasing, it sounds like you still intend the possibility of companies owning copyrights; but how does that happen (other than copyrights already owned by companies grandfathered in)?

Copyright always starts off in the hands of individual human beings; it only ends up in the hands of companies when those human beings transfer ownership to a company. That ownership transfer can be automatic as a term of a contract, e.g. as part of a work-for-hire agreement. But no contract can cause the copyright to come into existence already held by the company instead of the individual. So if you abolish ownership transfer, you effectively make work-for-hire IP assignment invalid. What replaces it?

And, if "nothing"... then how do people pool the IP rights of their own small contributions to a large-scale work, into an IP pool that can be legally defended by a coherent legal entity, so that the large-scale work itself can have market value (i.e. so that sales of polished commercial bootlegs don't drive sales of the "authentic" work to zero)?

Keep in mind that, no matter how much we might want "mass distributed" media to have more-reasonable IP terms, the ability to sue for infringement is still critical to the existence of some forms of media. Especially "location-based" media, with no equivalent licensed broadcast right: movies still in theatre; concerts; live performances of plays and musicals; etc. If there's no legal team that can sue a movie theatre that shows an unlicensed copy of a given movie, then no movie theatre will ever bother with licensing movies again; "box office" goes to zero (from the movie company's perspective); and the incentive to create movies in the first place declines massively.

(You can see what this alternate world looks like from the few cases where movies screwed up the steps required to assert copyright, back before copyright was automatic. Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a good example: theatres — even upstanding large-chain theatres! — did indeed leap at the opportunity to show the movie unlicensed, and so Romero et al made effectively zero revenue off the work.)

I'm not saying this is an impossible problem. There are ways to accomplish this besides the way it's done now. (For example, individual-contributor IP could be retained by the original owners, but cross-licensed between individuals through a collaboration structure to form a coherent defensible IP pool, in exactly the same way that IP for e.g. video codecs is cross-licensed between corporations to form a coherent defensible IP pool today.) I'm just pointing out that the problem does need to be solved.

Yknow, aside from the books they are literally destroying while scanning

The problem here is you need a trustworthy government for nationalizing to make a difference. The current US admin started with DOGE and a crypto rug pull.

>If the government supports the leading models then we should protect ourselves by making the government own more of it.

Weird, weird weird take. How does any of this work. Like you cant influence the first decision but you can magically influence the second?

How can "the people" nationalize a lab? I'm people, how can I do it?

I would argue they should have to. They scraped data off others, a lot of whom did not want that data to be used for AI training, and still had to share it with the frontier labs. It’s only fair they should have to hand it back.

The only way US maintains dominance over Chinese models is by having an ecosystem of models. Relying on a small set of frontier labs will only let you get ahead temporarily. I agree with Gary Tan on this one.

That's fine, they just gotta tone down the victim rhetoric.

Fewer people would create scientific or artistic works if they could just be copied or used without protection either; or so is the premise behind copyright and intellectual property; even being deeply embedded into the US Constitution (Art 1, Sec 8, Clause 8).

There is sooo much irony here.

This is our generation's "Saddam has WMDs". It's something the big labs thought up when they were trying to figure out how to make their product sound scary enough to deserve regulation. Literally no one is doing this or even trying, anyone who would want to do it would have already done it. Not worried about it.

"Bioweapon" information is not useful without a lab for synthesis.

Someone with that lab could almost certainly figure out how do something stupid or destructive on their own, or bypass model safeguards somehow.

I'm also certain that they violated countless ToS when they scrapped the internet for training purpose.

Supposing it is true, then I'm glad the AI companies are getting a taste of their own medicine.

> The moniker gives them an air of scientific, knowledgeable, tranquil, pro-social, pro bono work.

The Atlantic argued this (rather well, IMO) a week or so ago - "There’s No Such Thing as an AI ‘Lab’" - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/stop-calling-...

“We don’t know what’s going on” is essentially marketing. Sure we don’t _know_ but we have intuitions about why, where, and how to make certain changes…

We also associate laboratories with evil scientists and Frankenstein and the like. I can just hear Boris Karloff (er Bobby Picket) uttering “I was working in the lab late one night. When my eyes beheld an eerie sight… … … …the monster mash”. If anything, I associate _uncertainty_ with labs. The result is never known up front, they’re a place of discovery.

But I get your meaning. What should they be called instead? AI Sausage Factories maybe (cue Upton Sinclair?)?

It used to be OpenAI was a real research organization that wrote real open-access papers that aren't marketing brochures, and when they did large training runs, they released all artifacts including model weights. Now certainly they are anything but. We haven't learned learned anything meaningful about ML from OpenAI since GPT-3 was released.

Their open-weights competitors like Facebook can at least claim some kind of public benefit, but it's still just running a well-understood algorithm on dubiously obtained data with longer and longer runs, give or take some inconsequential architectural tweaks.

Anthropic's mechanistic interpretability work is the most "lab-like" of these, but it's still just secondary to selling subscriptions and fear-mongering for regulatory capture/investment/publicity.

More than fair if you consider that the tokens are paid for.

If someone proposes the right thing for selfish reasons, do we call that bad? Or do we call it proper incentive alignment?

> versus relying on open weight frontier capabilities

ahem.. it happens even today, you can use open weight models directly and even fine tune

The majority of revenue comes from API usage. The majority of usage comes from subscriptions. For any of the numbers to make any sense, subscriptions must be subsidized ergo the majority of usage is subsidized. A single $200 subscription can incur upwards of $10,000 in API equivalent usage (and even more when there are frequent resets).

If it were true that Anthropic and OpenAI were profitable on all inference they wouldn’t need to constantly raise so much money. Anthropic regularly announce huge investments in infrastructure but it is all smoke and mirrors, data center build out costs aren’t being paid by OpenAI and Anthropic, they’re financed externally. Google, for example, are backstopping tens of billions of datacenter build outs that are being financed based on commitments but not investment from Anthropic.

You are underestimating the insanity of subscription subsidization. Being profitable on API inference is meaningless when it is such a small proportion of usage and is only going to fall off a cliff as cheap open weight models become more capable.

https://hraness.com/writing/my-girlfriend-asked-me-why-i-hav...

The absolute majority of tokens are being subsidized and as soon as the subsidies end usage will fall off a cliff, rendering all the data center buildout a terrible waste of money.

> Inference is not being subsidized and in fact has pretty high margins.

1. Companies are trying to decrease costs, not increase it, and are looking at alternatives

2. Competitors are catching up, and even if the frontier labs are "better" at some things (like writing plans or complicated analysis), the competitors can take a lot of the inference on routine tasks like implementing a well-defined plan

3. The frontier labs don't just need to have high margins right now. They have to pay back their massive liabilities.

> Inference is not being subsidized and in fact has pretty high margins.

I was referring to the "AI labs" here. Sam Altman himself conceded that OpenAI is losing money on the $200 subscription. Using open-weight/open-source models is indeed cheaper (and no reason for inference to be subsidized).

I agree with this statement in general, but it “hurts less” to spend money when you are running things yourself. Hard for me to give a specific definition as to why, but it may be more palatable to companies to burn their own cash on their own hardware.

Maybe it is “sunked cost” or maybe it is “I will do it myself dammit”.

Inb4 Apple buys OAI in 10 years and gets 75% of the consumer market.

This made me laugh out loud but ain't it the truth.

> You're basically arguing that a criminal syndicate must be allowed to continue and we're required to make their business model make sense?

This is how Uber worked. They didn't just break the law in different countries, in several they actively misled government/law enforcement investigations. Google "Greyball".

So far the next tier has only demonstrated that they can catch up to, but not necessarily leapfrog, what the top tier has put out publicly.

I suspect the top labs will come up with a business model that doesn't involve handing out their secret sauce for everyone else to reverse engineer. Perhaps restricting their top models to select high paying government/enterprise contracts. Or maybe a bespoke "describe the problem and we'll solve it for you" type service.

Only ways to rise in a UBI society where AI is supposed to replace intellectual work is crime and prostitution. Smart people who want better lives than the average will have to get into crime.

Gates has been a ruthless fairly evil genius business man his whole life