Max Kraan

building tools for music makers 👾 ai researcher and engineer | music and audio tech

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@elonmusk I think you have a misunderstanding of what independence means

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@elonmusk It’s a trap

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@_lyraaaa_ Unfortunately llm-slop gives those „investors“ the illusion of massive potential roi - small researchers are def doing cooler things but w/o the incentives of their non-existent investors in mind. Also small researchers might not want to consider those incentives

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@elonmusk What if we do that calculation per capita? 🧐

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@Snadbad Glove fulla Vaseline?

[Daniel Merja @danielmerja]

Microsoft: Sam, we are fully in support of OpenAI’s mission and we are ready to provide any resources needed to advance your vision:

Sam Altman: I need $7T

Microsoft:

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

Can anyone point me towards good references on learning rate scheduling for 1B+ parameter models?

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@dadabots This might become the de facto standard if we’re not careful, or is it inevitable that infinite music in a way renders all music ephemeral

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

"None of your decisions would determine whether someone lives or dies; you only bring joy to the world. Turn off music and we’re going  to have a terrible world" - @lyorcohen on the music industry

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@noamauerabch @SnoopDogg Seems quite recent tho, your prediction wasn’t that

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’.

First off, I want to say that there are lots of people at Stability who are deeply thoughtful about these issues. I’m proud that we were able to launch a state-of-the-art AI music generation product trained on licensed training data, sharing the revenue from the model with rights-holders. I’m grateful to my many colleagues who worked on this with me and who supported our team, and particularly to Emad for giving us the opportunity to build and ship it. I’m thankful for my time at Stability, and in many ways I think they take a more nuanced view on this topic than some of their competitors.

But, despite this, I wasn’t able to change the prevailing opinion on fair use at the company.

This was made clear when the US Copyright Office recently invited public comments on generative AI and copyright, and Stability was one of many AI companies to respond. Stability’s 23-page submission included this on its opening page:

“We believe that Al development is an acceptable, transformative, and socially-beneficial use of existing content that is protected by fair use”.

For those unfamiliar with ‘fair use’, this claims that training an AI model on copyrighted works doesn’t infringe the copyright in those works, so it can be done without permission, and without payment. This is a position that is fairly standard across many of the large generative AI companies, and other big tech companies building these models — it’s far from a view that is unique to Stability. But it’s a position I disagree with.

I disagree because one of the factors affecting whether the act of copying is fair use, according to Congress, is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”. Today’s generative AI models can clearly be used to create works that compete with the copyrighted works they are trained on. So I don’t see how using copyrighted works to train generative AI models of this nature can be considered fair use.

But setting aside the fair use argument for a moment — since ‘fair use’ wasn’t designed with generative AI in mind — training generative AI models in this way is, to me, wrong. Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works. I don’t see how this can be acceptable in a society that has set up the economics of the creative arts such that creators rely on copyright.

To be clear, I’m a supporter of generative AI. It will have many benefits — that’s why I’ve worked on it for 13 years. But I can only support generative AI that doesn’t exploit creators by training models — which may replace them — on their work without permission.

I’m sure I’m not the only person inside these generative AI companies who doesn’t think the claim of ‘fair use’ is fair to creators. I hope others will speak up, either internally or in public, so that companies realise that exploiting creators can’t be the long-term solution in generative AI.

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@opiumhum on point.

though I can't deny that I would still love to have an alternative, this single descriptor has helped me dig up some gems in the past

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

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[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@csteinmetz1 @mattricesound @dadabots @honualx I mean, for one I don’t think musicians are asking for much. But I guess what I’m trying to get at is the nature of technology and art produced when we shift creative autonomy across the spectrum of fully automatic to „another tool“

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@csteinmetz1 @mattricesound @dadabots @honualx There could be a nice debate to be had between the hands off / 100% generative vs. human in the loop camps. Imo that’s the most interesting topic in the space right now

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@opiumhum @Mixmag Do you know where we can find out more about the distribution / breadth of this fund?

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@JLenzyy Interesting, what are the exact definitions of density and intensity used here?

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

X: Proof that even the most seasoned builders go: "Hey everyone look at my super cool logo of my super cool project that doesn't exist yet.."

[Max Kraan @_maxkraan]

@naotokui_en @neutone_ai congrats! looking forward to what's coming