Reuters reported on Sunday that tech giant Nvidia is facing a lawsuit from a group of authors who claim it used their copyrighted material without permission to train its artificial intelligence (AI) platform NeMo.
As per the report, Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O'Nan stated that their works were part of a dataset of over 196,640 books used to train NeMo to mimic regular written language before its removal in October due to alleged copyright infringement.
LLM's Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
The lawsuit contends that Nvidia's removal of the books implies acknowledgment that it used the dataset to train NeMo, thus violating their copyrights. According to Reuters, the authors seek unspecified damages for individuals in the United States whose copyrighted works contributed to training NeMo's large language models (LLMs) over the past three years. LLMs are utilized to drive AI tools such as NeMo, which Nvidia describes as a quick and cost-effective means to implement generative AI.
The lawsuit alleges that the books were part of a dataset called The Pile, which included a collection of books known as Books3, which Nvidia has acknowledged training its NeMo Megatron AI models.
The NeMo Megatron models were hosted on a website called Hugging Face, which provided information about the training dataset and mentioned that the model was trained on The Pile. The Books3 dataset from The Pile was listed on Hugging Face until October 2023, when it was taken down due to reported copyright infringement and labeled as defunct and inaccessible.
Nvidia chose not to comment on the ongoing legal matter.
Growing Trend on AI Litigation
Nvidia's class-action lawsuit is part of a growing litigation trend targeting AI companies. Last December, a group of 11 authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and its partner, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement. The New York Times filed a separate lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming that these tech companies utilized its content without authorization to develop their AI products during the same period.
Nvidia's Standing in the Chip Market
Nvidia's position as a top AI chipmaker has led to its stock skyrocketing by almost 600% since the end of 2022, pushing its market value to nearly two trillion two hundred billion dollars.
When asked for a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson said that the company values content creators' and owners' rights and is dedicated to collaborating to ensure that they can leverage AI technology and explore new revenue models.
Nvidia is poised to surpass Apple and become the world's second-most valuable company as the AI industry expands, which further solidifies Nvidia's dominance, where it currently holds an 80% share.
As of Friday, Nvidia's market capitalization was nearing the two trillion three hundred eighty billion dollars threshold, positioning it two hundred thirty billion dollars behind Apple and six hundred forty-five billion dollars behind the leading Microsoft.
