Over the past few months it’s become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a “clean room” implementation of code. The most famous version …
No, absolutely not. It is safe to assume that most/all open source (and otherwise) has been part of the training data. You need not look further than the fact that some models can recite Harry Potter from memory. There is no such thing as “clean room” for AI.
Ironically though this makes the reverse a bit more defensible (i.e. using an LLM to reverse engineer a proprietary app) because that proprietary app’s source code is less likely to be among the publicly available dataset.
But I imagine the corpos aren’t going to look fondly on that for obvious reasons.
This really isn’t true though, even if it is currently true in many cases. Case in point, if I wrote something and published it right now, it wouldn’t be part of any AI model yet. A party with a lot of money (like, say, a tech corporation) could easily create a bespoke coding model that is trained on everything but the desired libraries, thus achieving “clean room”.
No, absolutely not. It is safe to assume that most/all open source (and otherwise) has been part of the training data. You need not look further than the fact that some models can recite Harry Potter from memory. There is no such thing as “clean room” for AI.
Ironically though this makes the reverse a bit more defensible (i.e. using an LLM to reverse engineer a proprietary app) because that proprietary app’s source code is less likely to be among the publicly available dataset.
But I imagine the corpos aren’t going to look fondly on that for obvious reasons.
This really isn’t true though, even if it is currently true in many cases. Case in point, if I wrote something and published it right now, it wouldn’t be part of any AI model yet. A party with a lot of money (like, say, a tech corporation) could easily create a bespoke coding model that is trained on everything but the desired libraries, thus achieving “clean room”.