Section 230 and AI [WSJ]

 The AI Industry Is Steaming Toward A Legal Iceberg [March 29, 2024]

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 has long protected internet platforms from being held liable for the things we say on them. (In short, if you say something defamatory about your neighbor on Facebook, they can sue you, but not Meta.) This law was foundational to the development of the early internet and is, arguably, one reason that many of today’s biggest tech companies grew in the U.S., and not elsewhere.

 Yup, ChatGPT != Facebook.

And as companies like OpenAI argue in legal briefs over whether scraping copyrighted content from the internet counts as theft of intellectual property, they may actually be hurting their case that they aren’t responsible for the content their systems produce. 

Some AI companies have argued that their AIs “substantially transform” all the content they are trained on. That means, they argue, that they don’t violate copyright protections, under the doctrine of fair use. If that is true, it would seem to indicate they are “substantial co-creators” of the content they are displaying. That is the point at which a company is no longer merely hosting content, and loses the protection of Section 230, says Ryan.

An interesting bind! 

Humane AI Pin -- Quick Thoughts

I've been skeptical of the Ai Pin's chance for success since their interesting November 15, 2023 launch video. 

Now, having just watched Humane's 28 minute AI Pin Video Handbook I've got to put pen to paper.

Read on for rough/basic analysis, not judgement. 

A boring view of today's A.I. startups

Josh Miler, CEO Browser Co, 03-25-24

Exhibits #37, #38 of Commoditize Your Complements

The concept via  Strategy Letter V by Joel Spolsky

Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company’s strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the “commodity price” — the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. 

So: Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.

If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more.

Applied to Facebook via Strictly VC [06-16-23]

Meta wants other companies to freely use and profit from new AI software it's developing, and it's working on ways to make the next version of its open-source large-language model available for commercial use, says The Information. The outlet notes that the move could prompt a feeding frenzy among AI developers who want alternatives to proprietary software sold by rivals Google and OpenAI.

Applied to Apple via Apple Releases AI Research Paper, Apple + Gemini? [03-18-2024] 

First, Apple has long been open about core technology undergirding their products, from WebKit (Safari’s browser engine, which was later forked to create Chromium, Chrome’s browser engine) to LLVM (compiler technology that is used throughout the industry) to Swift (Apple’s preferred programming language). It is very much in Apple’s interest to contribute to and benefit from communities around core technologies.

Second, what Apple is very secretive about are products. Ergo, MM1 is not a product for Apple; it’s a model — or a precursor to a model — that will be used by Apple to make products, which the company will be very secretive about! To put it another way, Apple’s isn’t competing with OpenAI here; they are commoditizing a complement (while, not quite, at least not yet, but moving in that direction).