Re: Help building Pen.el (GPT for emacs)

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > I think the end-goal should be to have a close collaboration with
  > EleutherAI, who already have an open-source alternative to the Copilot
  > model. It's called GPT-j.

Perhaps that is a good path, but we need to know more.

You've described this as an "open-source alternative".  Most of the
time, when developers describe their work as "open-source", it is
because they don't share our ethical principles and criteria.  For
instance, most open-source programs are free/libre, but there are
exceptions.

So we need to look at what they are developing to see what software it
consists of, and whether it consists entirely of free software that
can be included in a version of the GNU system.

See https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html.

  > The problem is that there are very few people within EleutherAI using emacs
  > and few people who can help.

Assuming they are heading for the right goal, it would be great for
you to offer your help, and I'm sure they will find plenty of people
here who would like to do that.

If they could make their system keep track of licenses from which text
was obtained, they could implement something to avoid one of the
pitfalls of Copilot: that it gives you a substantial amount of code
that is substantially similar to one copyright work and thus leads
you unknowing into infringement.



-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)