Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

Posted May 11, 2024 17:24 UTC (Sat) by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
In reply to: Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy by mb
Parent article: Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

> But we must be cautious, that the holes are not equipped with check valves [1]. The holes shall benefit free work as well and not only proprietary work.
> If the LLMs learnt from large proprietary code bases, too, then I would actually be happy with the status quo.
> But currently the flow of code is basically only from open source into proprietary.

The end goal is that there's no proprietary software, just software. We don't get there by making copyright even more draconian that it is now, and it's already really bad.

> When do we see the LLM trained on all of Microsoft's internal code?

As a wild guess, probably when it gets out of the atrociously horrendous internal git forge it lives in right now and into Github. Which is not anytime soon, or likely ever, sadly, because it would cost an arm and a leg and throw most of the engineering org into utter chaos. One can only wish.

Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

Posted May 11, 2024 17:38 UTC (Sat) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (3 responses)

> The end goal is that there's no proprietary software, just software.
> We don't get there by making copyright even more draconian that it is now

Yes. But we also don't get there my circumventing all Open Source licenses and installing a check valve into the direction of proprietary software.

The end goal of having "just software" actually means that everything is Open Source. (The other option would be to kill Open Source).
Which I currently don't see as a realistic possibility.

Not only the end goal is important, but also the intermediate steps.

Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

Posted May 11, 2024 17:41 UTC (Sat) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (2 responses)

> Yes. But we also don't get there my circumventing all Open Source licenses and installing a check valve into the direction of proprietary software.

You'll be delighted to know that's not how any of this works, then - it's just autocomplete with some extra powers and bells and whistles, it doesn't circumvent anything

Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

Posted May 11, 2024 21:22 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

The Intel architectural branch predictor is just a fancy autocomplete too. And it's perfectly safe.

Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

Posted May 12, 2024 11:39 UTC (Sun) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

It is*!

* (when only fully trusted workloads are executed, no malware allowed, pinky swear)

Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

Posted May 13, 2024 10:16 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> > When do we see the LLM trained on all of Microsoft's internal code?

> As a wild guess, probably when it gets out of the atrociously horrendous internal git forge it lives in right now and into Github. Which is not anytime soon, or likely ever, sadly, because it would cost an arm and a leg and throw most of the engineering org into utter chaos. One can only wish.

Alas, this is kind of my baseline for believing Microsoft's stance that Copilot doesn't affect copyright: eat the same damn cake you're forcing down everyone else's throats (IIRC you work at Microsoft, but the "you" here is at Microsoft PR/lawyers, not bluca specifically).

If Copilot really can only be trained on code accessible over the Github API and not raw git repos, that seems a bit short-sighted, no?