I don’t necessarily fault OpenAI’s decision to initially train their models without entering into licensing agreements - they probably wouldn’t exist and the generative AI revolution may never have happened if they put the horse before the cart. I do think they should quickly course correct at this point and accept the fact that they clearly owe something to the creators of content they are consuming. If they don’t, they are setting themselves up for a bigger loss down the road and leaving the door open for a more established competitor (Google) to do it the right way.
It is clear OpenAI or Google did not use only Common Crawl. With so many press conferences why did no research journalist ask yet from OpenAI or Google to confirm or deny if they use or used LibGen?
Did OpenAI really bought an ebook of every publication from Cambridge Press, Oxford Press, Manning, APress, and so on? Did any of investors due diligence, include researching the legality of the content used for training?
Edit: same applies to humans. Just because a healthcare company puts up a S3 bucket with patient health data with “robots: *” doesn’t give you a right to view or use the crawled patient data. In fact, redistributing it may land you in significant legal trouble. Something being crawlable doesn’t provide elevated rights compared to something not crawlable.