Post

another researcher accuses OpenAI of training on conversations and then claiming a breakthrough

Transformer models produced training data text verbatim frequently 2+ years ago. The technology itself has not substantially changed. It's plausible that the lower frequency of verbatim output is the result of mitigation rather than absence. Glad if mathematicians are mad. Coders let this happen.

I haven't seen it since, but Opus 4.5 on bedrock gave me 2 full, exact paragraphs of Tale of Two Cities, without any I/O AFAIK. It has been extremely hard for me to suspend my skepticism when people tell me LLMs don't plagiarize. Small perturbations to avoid string match actually makes me more mad.

that’s a pretty small excerpt but anyway, the NYT wasn’t able to prove it in court. same as several others not to say it’s impossible, it’s just a bug in the training data if it’s memorizing (arguably not for tale of two cities, since it’s meant to be quotable)

There are a lot of things the judicial and regulatory systems aren't prepared to handle (yet). Anthropic just paid $1.5B. For provenance, yes. It shouldn't be fair use because it competes with the original work. When people tell me it can't quote and it does it's a major reputational problem.

one way to think about it: have you ever been able to sing the lyrics to a song but not stop to think what the song is about? basically the same principle with LLMs. they try to force rephrasing so the *idea* is picked up instead of the phrasing