story as old as internet itself!
These companies haven't got the attention span to work on one thing for that long.
The driving constraint if you want to take a spot in B2C is the speed at which consumers replace tech, not the speed at which tech can be developed.
Wrong question. The real question is "Who and what will they buy with the gold?"
The golden rule is just the beginning, and no, there's nothing positive for the rest of us.
But the big money has been skipping Leg Day for ages, and that lack of a foundation will bite us all. Which sucks.
Then, by the time GPT 5.5 came out you could already generate a flawless PDF and Word doc resume with the same formatting as your base resume. It really is amazing.
Trying to compete with these labs is a bad idea, you might work hard on your thin wrapper and then they come out and have their chatbot or harness do it way better than you.
But I also think this is really cool. It's a new era in software. Build something worthwhile and you won't need to worry about a lab doing the same thing with their chatbot.
They think whatever you are doing is cute and would very much like to ensure their models can do it even better in the future, but competing? Not even worth the time to think about
LLM generated code is not copyrightable, so even if they do "steal" it - I don't think there's legal grounds to do anything about it.
It can't be stolen. You don't really own it.
You can try to lock it in a safe and hope no one ever gets a hold of it. You can lie and say you didn't use an LLM, but Anthropic and OpenAI et al probably have logs to disprove that.
But, if push comes to shove, you don't own it...
Someone tried, as a bit of a stunt, to register a work for copyright with generative AI as the sole creator/author. That registration was rejected. This is quite different from a person using generative AI as a tool to create a work.
People have copyright in photos and videos they create, even if they used a camera. Same with images and code, even if they used an LLM.
I'm not your lawyer, but to the extent you have copyright in works you create, the fact that you used a tool doesn't diminish the copyright.
The clearest part from the page:
> Before the proliferation of generative AI, U.S. courts did not extend copyright protection to various nonhuman authors, holding that a monkey who took photos of himself lacked standing to sue under the Copyright Act; that human authorship was required to copyright a book purportedly inspired by celestial beings; and that a living garden could not be copyrighted. The U.S. Copyright Office has also long maintained that copyrighted works must be "created by a human being" and therefore refused to register works that are "produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author."
I think the long story short is if you're incorporting LLM generated content into your own work, then your own work is copyrighted but if it's purely AI created and you never put any of your own work into it, it's not (so: think the slop cannons people are pointing at social media for example -- probably not copyrighted (although I don't know why you'd want to put your name on it anyway)). Granted, I don't know how you'd ever prove that something was purely LLM generated so it's kind of a technicality for coding, but for image and music I think it applies pretty clearly.
As an aside, I think socially maintaining that copyrights are for humans only is extremely important. It might be the most important legal matter around this. I see nothing good of allowing AI labs that have strip-mined the internet to claim a copyright on the things they regurgitate, and I don't think spammers deserve copyright protection either. The human-only requirement is a very good one.
Also, a lot of people using LLMs are using it on code bases that were written before LLMs were common for coding. So in that context, you really are allowing them to train on your code for free.
> It can't be stolen. You don't really own it.
At least in the UK computer generated code has been copyright-able for decades [1]
> (3)In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.
And the ToS of the major/minor AI providers as far as i can tell have no opinion on what you do with the code in terms of ownership.
[citation needed]
I've seen cases where it was determined that the LLM itself doesn't hold copyright. But where are you getting the idea that nobody holds copyright?