The timezone fetch was to alter program behaviour at runtime, not to send arbitrary timezones for tracking reasons.
It was one way of detecting if it was a chinese person using the program and then behaving differently.
Malware behaves this way. STUXNET for example was wired to do nothing except propagate unless the environment had the right conditions.
Most services I know that are trying to block abuse do collect device info
Even hotel and flight websites work like that, they determine your ability to pay based on your location, wall clock time and device OS - and FSM knows whatever else.
Are they malware too, basically STUXNET?
The issue is that by distilling Claude, Alibaba reuses the IP anthropic used to train the model that's more akin to historical Chinese reverse engineering methods and disrespect of IP
Also, you can't copyright AI outputs. So worst case they violated the ToS.
(granted, only meta got caught using Anna's Archive, but it seems safe to assume it's common practice. And even if it wasn't, the websites in Common Crawl are still covered by copyright)
Fwiw, I think the concept of IP in general is counter to human progress.
Sure, one person gets rewarded more with the IP system. But at the same time, that breakthrough then can't be built upon by others.
Overall, I think it does more harm than good because of how it monopolizes technologies and ossifies development.
I think free sharing of knowledge will always beat intellectual stinginess.
Outside of military technologies they had massively fallen behind the west by the 80s. Without the western tech they licensed or copied they were permanently stuck in the 50s. Even their crappy cars were licensed copies of cheap European cars from the 60s.
When it comes to consumer electronics, vehicles and a bunch of other things they were comically behind. So it’s really not a good example..
> monopolizes technologies and ossifies development.
As bad as it might be empirical evidence shows that historically a superior system has never existed (it might be feasible but everything that was tried underperformed).
Good grief. All one has to do is look at how humanity has consistently progressed due iterating on what has existed is how we progress, not whether some corporation that wants to rat fuck us all for a few pts in share value.
Progress was extremely slow until the 1800s. Coincidentally corporation and modern capitalism in general developed around the same time. Of course I’m not necessarily saying it was the main or direct course since it isn’t exactly possible to create an experiment comparing it to other systems (of course that was tried an failed completely in the USSR, Maoist China and similar places)
Historically most evidence seems to point to the contrary.
Amongst other things after the printing press was created it was impossible for anyone who was an author to survive from their work unless they were independently wealthy or had rich patrons.
In any case there's still a difference between publicly available copyrighted data and whether you can use it for model training, and the innovation around model training, RLHF, etc which you presumably have some interest as a country to allow companies to invest in with some legal protections (like the diff between patent law vs copyright law)
There are many cases in the early 2000s were copyright protections were relaxed for tech advancements
As frustrating as the anti-AI crowd can be, I see why they end up that way when the valley is full of opinions like this.
When they bulldoze the house to pave the highway, they toss the homeowner a few bucks. If you take an author’s books do you owe him a share of OpenAI?
You come with the selfless proposal that everyone give to the poor $tn companies”for the good of humanity”. I’ll assume this is just hopelessly naive but you post so insistently that it makes me wonder.
> disrespect of IP
Nobody other than Anthropic cares.
Why is this any worse than Anthropic's disrepect of IP? You've apparently drawn a distinction between the two here, but I'm failing to see what it actually is.
Search engines for example historically ignored copyright law by copying excerpts or serving other site images, it doesn't mean someone copying Google's code has some moral frepass
Copyright law is a subset of IP law. What IP is being infringed upon here?
> Search engines for example historically ignored copyright law by copying excerpts or serving other site images
Excerpts are often considered fair use, but it depends on country.
> it doesn't mean someone copying Google's code has some moral frepass
Nobody copied Anthropic's code. They used it's output to train another model. At most they violated some terms of service.
Did they maybe abuse Anthropic's subsidised pricing? Sure. But that's what happens in a free market if you sell below cost.
That had happened progressively, thumbnails for example were ruled as fair use later on, DMCA safe harbor was a huge gift for tech companies because otherwise it would curtail the ability to create platforms (relaxing copyright protections in exchange of innovation)
> Nobody copied Anthropic's code. They used it's output to train another model. At most they violated some terms of service
Distilling a model is a method that can push the entire market to low margins and prevent companies from making money off such research. It also copies the Anthropic special parts (RLHF and other specific methods) rather than the "copy of the entire web" part
This is similar to what happened with Chinese reverse engineering of American manufacturing or PC clones killing IBM PCs.
Is it in the interest of the USA, probably no, that's why I assume this will be backed by law eventually
Then it's on Anthropic to actually price their models accordingly so that distilling isn't profitable. Why does this need a legal remedy when market forces could easily resolve this?
> Is it in the interest of the USA, probably no
Good. The world needs to diversify away from dependence on US technology.
In my opinion further strengthening the CCP is a disaster for the world. A government that killed millions of its own citizens to stay in power is not who I would entrust super intelligence with. But apparently we are not going to agree on that
Generally Communist nations historically favored technological development to human life in the scale of millions, keep that in mind when we enter a new economic revolution
On a related note, around 300k people die in the US every year due to causes directly attributable to poverty. [0]
In other words, ~a million every three years.
Now what?
If both the USSR and the CCP had millions killed in the process of modernization, without stopping when knowing the death toll, maybe there's intent after all?
How would you describe the cultural revolution then? another case of economic mismanagement?
Is there intent there as well?
40 years on, when the CCP is leading its people making AI, robotics, drones, EVs, space station and moon rovers to compete with the US, people like you how never made any change to the world are talking such ideological nonsense.
you live in a history museum or something like that?
Not sure that's the best example as they lost that battle and had to pay, eventually it's been codified in law in most countries.