Now We Are Two

Obviously, the big news of the week is that our tiny little dictator, I mean, lovely little Maeryn, is now 2 years old! We celebrated with cake¹, balloons, presents, and the all-important Sunday Roast. Well, she’s older now, so it’s time for her to really understand her heritage. Next week: Dennis Potter. Or maybe she just plays with her new Little People Barbie Dream House for the moment…

The Atlantic had an exposé this week about how Meta used LibGen to train Llama models, along with a little search bar to see if a book or author is present in LibGen (and thus likely the text(s) was used to train a bunch of LLMs). I realized late in the day that I would likely be in the database, and lo…I have 3 entries, including the German version of my PyTorch book. I am mostly fine with this, and I’m more amused that some of my writing has gone into training Meta’s LLM how to write PyTorch code, PyTorch being a Meta-owned project. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that, being both a wizened anti-copyright person that came of age during the Copyleft Wars of the 90s², and somebody that doesn’t make their main income by writing books. I can see exactly where others are coming from, but I also don’t want to restrict us to a world where only OpenAI and Anthropic has the money to build and research models because nobody else can afford the usage fees on Common Crawl.

(also, I note that the AI narration that The Atlantic sticks on the article was almost certainly powered by using copyrighted content too…so…you’know)