It's unclear if today is 28% or if that's the whole year. TFA says:
> Stack Overflow has laid off 28 percent of its staff over a year after doubling its employee base in a massive hiring push.
and
> Coding help forum Stack Overflow is laying off 28 percent of its staff as it struggles toward profitability.
The linked letter from the CEO says:
> This year we took many steps to spend less. Changes have been pursued through the lens of minimizing impact to the lives of Stackers. Unfortunately, those changes were not enough and we have made the extremely difficult decision to reduce the company’s headcount by approximately 28%.
> State leaders had helped persuade the companies to open the facilities by offering big tax breaks and water and other infrastructure grants.
> Intel soon announced a $20 billion expansion in Chandler, with two additional factories that would bring 3,000 new jobs to the state. Chandler also approved $30 million in water and road improvements for the new plants.
Looks like this will use their public Q&A answers first to generate answers? It's not open to the public yet though so only time will tell how well it pulls from their site.
The way I look at this is the same way as if an art student goes and looks at 50 surrealist art pieces and then goes and attempts to paint one themselves. That doesn't break copyright and yet they've "trained" themselves by looking at those pieces of art. So, if that is true for an art student, why not an AI?
I agree with you. I think the counter argument could be that the the training data is incorporated into the weights, and therefore some version is being copied. What gets "copied" into the human mind is exempt from copyright because of the long standing precedent that it cant be controlled. I think, like you, training ML models should get the same "exemption" because it's primarily an experiential thing, not making a knock off like copying a video e.g.
I think people like the twitter poster see ML benefitting from freely available content in new ways, and are upset that someone is getting some benefit without paying for it. I think the last thing we need is new ways of trying to rent seek.
In general I agree with you. But it gets trickier once you look into more automated content generation.
It's been shown already that in natural language generation, as an example, big model frequently regurgitate full text passages. Similarly in computer code generation.
I had a class last semester where we were required to use AWS. Our professor tried his best to teach everyone how to be responsible with their tool use and how to predict their costs (As well as how to set up a free education account and get AWS credits). I was amazed when final presentations rolled around my group had a total cost of 4.30 dollars after 5 months of uptime and use, while other groups had costs ranging from 30 to 150 dollars! I use AWS for my job so I guess I just never really went through those growing pains, but no system should be that easy to rack up costs unknowingly.
California has really been pushing the idea that all their students are equal, while quietly opening more charter and magnet schools to support the students that are "more equal than others", it's just plain inefficient to split the levels of student achievement into completely separate campuses instead of just different classes.
Looks like the "State Board of Education appointed 20 members to the Mathematics Curriculum Framework and Evaluation Criteria Committee (Mathematics CFCC) to assist in the development of the Mathematics Framework." Looks like this is more than just a rouge admin, unfortunately.
