Sunday, April 6, 2025

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To what extent has OpenAI trained its models on copyrighted content? And is that training protected as fair use?

These are big questions that will be debated as the company faces lawsuits from authors, publishers, and other rights holders. But a new study co-authored by researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Copenhagen, and Stanford may at least shed some light on the issue, according to Kyle Wiggers.

The researchers argue that by asking GPT-4 to guess words that are "high surprisal" (namely, uncommon in the context of a larger work), they found evidence that the model has been trained on popular fiction e-books, as well as New York Times articles.

Keep reading to see what else TechCrunch is covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

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Is San Francisco bouncing back? The city's new mayor, Dan Lurie, spoke at our StrictlyVC San Francisco event, where he highlighted his administration's efforts to make sure SF stays at the center of the startup ecosystem, particularly when it comes to AI.

Flexport CEO still sees opportunity for global trade: Also at StrictlyVC, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen discussed the Trump administration's tariff plans and made the case for remaining optimistic (at least in the long term) about international trade.

All the latest tech layoffs: Layoffs hit a broad swath of tech companies in March, from Block to HelloFresh to Sequoia Capital — to say nothing of the big cuts at government agencies like NASA. To help readers stay current on these changes, we've updated TechCrunch's comprehensive layoff tracker.

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What else we're reading 📗

Politico takes a broader look at how Silicon Valley is reacting to Elon Musk's work with the Trump administration. Apparently a number of (largely anonymous) sources say the industry's liberal-leaning corners remain fearful of criticizing Musk's efforts to dismantle huge swaths of the federal government.

Also, Defector looks at how we're littering Earth with space trash.