A GitHub project called GPT4free (opens in new tab) allows you to get free access to the GPT4 and GPT3.5 models by funneling those queries through sites like You.com (opens in new tab), Quora (opens in new tab) and CoCalc (opens in new tab) and giving you back the answers. The project is GitHub's most popular new repo, getting 14,000 stars this week.

On the backend, GPT4Free is visiting various API urls that sites like You.com, an AI-powered search engine that employs OpenAI's GPT3.5 model for its answers, use for their own queries. For example, the main GPT4Free script hits the URL https://you.com/api/streamingSearch, feeds it various parameters, and then takes the JSON it returns and formats it. The GPT4Free repo also has scripts that grab data from other sites such as Quora, Forefront, and TheB. Any enterprising developer could use these simple scripts to make their own bot.

If those sites are relying on ad revenue from their sites to offset these API costs, they are losing money because of these queries.

Perhaps more importantly, Xtrekky noted, any of these sites could block external uses of their internal APIs with common security measures.

Xtrekky said that he has advised all the sites that wrote to him that they should secure their APIs, but none of them has done so. So, even if he takes the scripts down from his repo, any other developer could do the same thing.

Under US law, the issue is quite clear: you need an inventor and an inventor needs to be human, to get a patent. There are many good reasons for this: mainly because the entire point of the patent system is to create incentives to invent. An AI system… doesn’t need that incentive. It just responds to inputs.

I’m sorry, but what?!? Larry Lessig arguing that not giving out patents to AI “jeopardizes billions in current and future investments?” This is the same Lessig, after all, who created Creative Commons and spent years and multiple books explaining how locking up knowledge via intellectual monopolies was harmful

First of all, most inventions wouldn’t be protected by trade secrets anyway, because most things can be reverse engineered. Second, the value in inventing something is in bringing that product to market. That’s where you make the money, in selling the product, not the patent. Third, the point of the patent is to help the inventor recoup the capital expenditure in creating the invention in the first place. But, AI is cheap and can generate tons of ideas quickly. The capex is minimal.

If the makers of AI are concerned that they can’t make money without patents, just ask their AI to invent products they can sell in the market. They don’t need patents. They need products.