Year twelve opens with the copyright case this archive pre-registered fifteen months ago (#238: “the litigation defining this decade files within months” — late by a year, correct in kind): THE NEW YORK TIMES v. OPENAI AND MICROSOFT, filed December 27th, and it’s the strong version of the claim — not just “you trained on our archive” but exhibit after exhibit of GPT-4 reproducing Times articles near-VERBATIM under adversarial prompting (the memorization receipts the fair-use debate has been waiting for), plus the market-substitution argument (Browse-with-Bing summarizing paywalled recipes) that turns an abstract doctrine into a revenue chart. The file’s read: this is the case BOTH sides arguably want — the labs need the training-data question settled at precedent altitude rather than by a thousand district-court paper cuts, the publishers need leverage for the licensing market that is obviously the endgame (Axel Springer and AP already signed; the Times sued AFTER negotiations stalled, which tells you the suit IS the negotiation — #232’s contracts-as-adversarial-runbooks, media edition). Pre-registration for the file: no verdict ever lands — settlement plus licensing regime within two years, with the memorization exhibits driving the price. Either way, 2024’s AI story adds a fourth branch of government to the #264 stack: the judiciary has entered the training loop.
The year-ahead board, per the #267 sprint list: an election cycle running on the #263 degraded information immune system (the file’s braced posture holds), Vision Pro in February (#254’s window opens), the agent watch-item compounding quietly, and — the macro ledger — rate-cut expectations doing to 2024 planning what hike expectations did to 2022’s (#231’s dot-plot dependency, now bidirectional). CES next week will produce one genuinely odd artifact worth filing (early leaks suggest AI-in-everything again, plus a small orange box called the Rabbit R1 that the keynote circuit is inexplicably excited about — the file pre-registers Juicero-pattern skepticism #105 pending the hand-squeeze test).
Sabbatical dispatch, year-opening (#267’s break, now real): the calendar is empty for the first time since 2013, and the M.Tech coursework has expanded to fill it — neural-network assignments due the same month the frontier makes them feel like archaeology, which is itself an education in curve-slope. And a report from the old badge, via the ex-colleague group chat that keeps me honest: the #251 review-first curriculum graduated its first full cohort this month WITHOUT me — their code-review comments sharper than any prior cohort’s at the same tenure. The ladder holds in my absence, which was always the actual test (#250): the curriculum turned out to be the deliverable, not the teacher. The Proverbs file opens year twelve at 301 entries and one thesis: judgment compounds, tools amplify, minutes matter (#243, #267 — the closing wager, now the operating system).
TIL: memorization-vs-generalization measurement — extraction-attack methodology, dedup’s role in training pipelines, and why verbatim regurgitation is an ENGINEERING artifact (data repetition in the corpus) as much as a legal one. The exhibits are a training-pipeline code review conducted by opposing counsel (#203’s discovery doctrine: the industry’s only true documentation, now including the datasets).