alt Hacker NewsUsing an LLM is not a clean room, imo. Its just IP laundering. Which is fine I guess if everyone is doing it, including the companies you're stealing from. I just dont know what the implications will be for progress.
Licensing/copyrighting encouraged people to think up of new things, and new ways of doing something. Now we're just all copying eachother.
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I agree. The vast amount of data ingested and internalized by LLMs has effectively been "laundered". But they are so powerful and evolving so fast that no one can be spared of their impact. We have to to learn to live with it. Traditional proprietary software being "laundered" is just one part of the broader story...
Doesn't clean room typically apply to cases where the "dirty" team has legitimate access to copyrighted code, like the IBM PC BIOS which was published in the technical reference manual, and uses this access to write a functional specification for the "clean" team?
I'm not sure how clean room would apply to commercial applications distributed in binary form, as there's no way to look at even disassembled code without violating the license agreement and therefore being in breach of contract and subject to potential copyright infringement claims for copying or even continuing to use the software, let alone cloning it, and surely you're not going to be subject to a copyright claim based on familiarity with the application from merely using it.
This is novel Rust/egui code that I imagine looks nothing like Adobe code. I've never seen their code, but it must be a mess of old C++, right?
It's considerably faster than their apps (at startup) too.
People made new and better things just like companies without copyright too. In recent times companies made things worse too.
What intellectual property is being laundered here if it's not even the same ecosystem (C++ vs Rust)? If it's so easy, and you just need to rebatch something existing, why has nobody done this over the last 20 years?