And now people such as myself have access to open weight models with that information. I wasn't lucky enough to have parents put me through school, and LLMs have absolutely helped me further educate myself and play "catch up" on opportunities others have been given. So, the net effect has been (and is continuing to be) a democratization of information.

There are many frames that one can place upon this issue. They do not contradict the other. There are moral framings (stole the internet so go eff yourselves, is one), but so is national security, and so is the doomer recursive self improvement risk, and then there is the framing purely on what this implies for future AI training.

I mainly focus on the last.

It will be hard for a frontier lab to justify spending the compute and data curation needed to advance AI further if that expenditure can be assimilated into your competitor's products within months/weeks. So reality will present labs with three choices:

A. Cease spending massive amounts of money and compute improving those models.

B. make those improved models more difficult to distill from, either through some regulatory regime, or some technical solution, which seems unlikely to me.

C. making the best models available only to select partners and government.

In all these potential outcomes, China, which lacks compute that U.S. labs enjoy, will likely stop seeing massive improvements in their AI models. Improvements to be sure, but right now they are enjoying gains from distillation AND their own model innovations, and these potential outcomes would largely stop one of those sources.

copyright infringement is not theft, even if right holders often claim it is.

part of the definition of theft is that the original owner is deprived of it, which does not apply to copyright infringement.

You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft

Moreover, reading a copyrighted book and learning from it is not theft.

Reread my comment and look for a value judgement on my part. The final sentence is probably a good clue as to my opinion.

Yes the fact that the scientific literature - created largely on the back of the tax payer - isn't open to all free of charge by force of law is a travesty. A cartel should not get to charge for access to the bulk of human knowledge. That is indeed a far more important issue than whether or not Moonshot violated the Anthropic ToS, possibly committing mass fraud in the course of doing so.

I mean honestly if they did that why should I care? I'm happy to see copyright violated in a manner that leads to the creation of new technology. IP law exists strictly for the benefit of society and by all appearances AI is an incredibly powerful tool.

Also while I'm at it libgen is a gift to humanity. Information wants to be free. Spreading and preserving knowledge is generally one of the most wholesome activities anyone can undertake as far as I'm concerned.

Your statement is orthogonal to my comment. Why reiterate the schadenfreude / fairness comment already stated several dozen times in this thread?

Who do you think is paying $100K+ for "Enterprise" access to Anna's Archive?