When Apple was accused of 'ripping off' PARC, Steve didn't seem keen to bring up this rather salient point. I suspect it may have been a combination of wanting Apple to continue receiving credit for these innovations from consumers and also the fact that, in retrospect, the million dollar stock deal could seem a bit like trading beads to Native Americans for Manhattan Island. Another point worth noting is that Apple's PARC visit was in December 1979 and the Xerox Star was publicly announced in April 1981, so Apple got a 15 month head start (the Apple Lisa shipped in Jan 83).

I've also heard that Xerox didn't hold on to the Apple stock for very long, so never gained the windfall they could have. As is well documented, Xerox senior management didn't understand what they had in PARC and also didn't understand how rapidly microcomputers would become ubiquitous. So, of course, they didn't think Apple's stock price would skyrocket either.

Both Anthropic and Alibaba are trying to build bleeding edge LLMs. That part is the same. The way they source their data is slightly different, but they would both argue it constitutes fair use under Copyright law.

Sucking down petabytes of peoples' copyrighted content that they never granted a specific license to you to use seems to be an unavoidable and default part of the process of building any huge LLM.

LLM's literally wouldn't work without the sum total of knowledge (in the forms of books and other copyrighted content) being used as 'training data' for these LLMs.

The 'bleeding edge' LLMs required many things, but: 1 Tech innovation ('attention') 2 Lots of compute 3 Data 4 Pre + post training

#4 doesn't happen without #3.

It's pretty obvious at this point that the major providers have stolen vast amounts of #3 - they have paid nearly 0 of the creators.

We can argue about the impact (I'd lean net good) vs. the cost. But arguing there isn't a cost is a bit silly.