Hi! I am the original author of the blog post and wanted to clear the air a bit here.
We credited Sapling because that's how Meta itself externally refers to the entire system, including the Mononoke server, and we wanted to follow that convention. We will add an additional footnote to clarify this.
We were inspired by many things while building Scion, such as the great ideas in Mononoke's Bonsai data model, and didn't intend to obfuscate that in any way. We were also inspired heavily by https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/03/04/turning-the-database..., for example, which also describes the "derived data" concept.
We also did not just tell Claude to build us a version control system; we did a lot of research on what would work and not work for our use case and coming from an existing large Git repo (rather than Mercurial, as Mononoke did) required many novelties beyond some of these data structures.
The intent was to give credit to Mononoke without getting too deep in the weeds of comparing and contrasting each point of the data model where we diverged. There are many ex-Meta employees at Anthropic who were inspired by how joyful using source control was because of Mononoke, which deserves a lot of credit to you and the source control team there. We had that experience as a north star from the beginning while making decisions that map to our (different) needs.
He might already have a main account but intentionally doesn't want to use it. I've noticed on X that OpenAI employees tend to post a lot more regarding their employer on their main X accounts than Anthropic employees do.
Thanks for coming on to "take the heat." Do you have any internal tools for auditing the codebase/model outputs to see how much direct overlap there is with the inspiration?
As a human who is deeply familiar with the codebase, what percentage of Scion's codebase would you estimate is directly inspired by Mononoke?
An employee at one of the worst companies in human history (META)--whose modus operandi is to destroy the social commons--complains that another of the modern era's potentially worst companies (Anthropic is, after all, offering a 10% chance of human annihilation) stole its data/code/something without proper attribution.
Rhymes with when Anthropic and OpenAI were mad that folks were distilling their models after Anthropic and OpenAI violated every intellectual property law they possibly could to build said models.
> my default assumption now is that Anthropic’s public engineering presentations are largely bad-faith ripoffs. That’s a shame.
Couldn't agree more.
I got nervous when the company claiming to be working on the most impactful technology in human history takes time away to instead brag about writing a slightly more efficient version control system.
The fact that they didn't actually build the side project themselves, and ripped it off from someone else also calls into question their good faith mission to shepherd humanity into a new era...
“The meanings overlap too. In horticulture a scion is the cutting grafted onto a rootstock, and grafting is a standard bonsai technique, used for example to add branches to pines and junipers. So two gardening words line up in sound and in subject.”- Claude
Picasso apocryphally said "good artists copy, great artists steal"
> Imagine how they must feel about their work being deliberately copied wholesale and intentionally presented as someone else’s.
Nobody copies from a mid-tier product.
As someone who worked in open source till recently, I've seen a copycat as validation that my idea was better than what they could come up with on their own.
All those people now have evidence that their approach is the best for an AI native future.
The interesting point is that there is overlap in personnel, so this is less of copied homework, more that Anthropic hired some good people who knew a good solution that worked.
But from a pure AI lens, this is what we're doing - putting great ideas into one system and now everyone can drink from that well.
The bad part is that the well has a coin meter next to it, rather than it being a commons. So the fruits of that is not distributed to the people who planted those seeds. This is also happening too fast that the people whose work is getting redistributed to others are still not done being compensated for their work.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" doesn't seem to me to about how wholesale the copying is but that the copy exceeds the original in creativity, beauty, or some other quality so much that it displaces the original, and makes the original seem like the inferior copy.
In that case copying something that is merely mediocre in most respects but has one outstanding quality, and generally exceeding it, makes sense.
I'm not sure any of that applies here except maybe that Anthropic might be more poised to make anything they publish suddenly very famous.
This is how I understood the quote as well, albeit there will always be a significant overlap between inspiration and imitation, and plagiarism is kind of a normal human thing to do. [0]
It's well known that AI companies shamelessly steal whatever to drum up hype for their company. From their perspective you the problem for trying to stop their hype train.
The Anthropic article [1] has author names as initials or first names,and I thought it was to prevent talent pouching, but now other possible intentions come to my mind...
Hi! I am the original author of the blog post and wanted to clear the air a bit here.
We credited Sapling because that's how Meta itself externally refers to the entire system, including the Mononoke server, and we wanted to follow that convention. We will add an additional footnote to clarify this.
We were inspired by many things while building Scion, such as the great ideas in Mononoke's Bonsai data model, and didn't intend to obfuscate that in any way. We were also inspired heavily by https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/03/04/turning-the-database..., for example, which also describes the "derived data" concept.
We also did not just tell Claude to build us a version control system; we did a lot of research on what would work and not work for our use case and coming from an existing large Git repo (rather than Mercurial, as Mononoke did) required many novelties beyond some of these data structures.
The intent was to give credit to Mononoke without getting too deep in the weeds of comparing and contrasting each point of the data model where we diverged. There are many ex-Meta employees at Anthropic who were inspired by how joyful using source control was because of Mononoke, which deserves a lot of credit to you and the source control team there. We had that experience as a north star from the beginning while making decisions that map to our (different) needs.
It feels strange to put "-anthropic" in your Hacker News username. Never seen this before. What happens if you don't work there anymore?
Just make a new account? Not like it costs money.
He might already have a main account but intentionally doesn't want to use it. I've noticed on X that OpenAI employees tend to post a lot more regarding their employer on their main X accounts than Anthropic employees do.
You also register -openai -deepmind -meta and -xsi
I don't use HN often, so I made an account for this purpose that would make it clear who I was in relation to the article.
They throw it away?
Thanks for coming on to "take the heat." Do you have any internal tools for auditing the codebase/model outputs to see how much direct overlap there is with the inspiration?
As a human who is deeply familiar with the codebase, what percentage of Scion's codebase would you estimate is directly inspired by Mononoke?
An employee at one of the worst companies in human history (META)--whose modus operandi is to destroy the social commons--complains that another of the modern era's potentially worst companies (Anthropic is, after all, offering a 10% chance of human annihilation) stole its data/code/something without proper attribution.
Rhymes with when Anthropic and OpenAI were mad that folks were distilling their models after Anthropic and OpenAI violated every intellectual property law they possibly could to build said models.
> my default assumption now is that Anthropic’s public engineering presentations are largely bad-faith ripoffs. That’s a shame.
Couldn't agree more.
I got nervous when the company claiming to be working on the most impactful technology in human history takes time away to instead brag about writing a slightly more efficient version control system.
The fact that they didn't actually build the side project themselves, and ripped it off from someone else also calls into question their good faith mission to shepherd humanity into a new era...
> Even the name “Scion” reverses the syllables of “Bonsai” and drops the “B”! This might be a coincidence, or might not.
huh
“The meanings overlap too. In horticulture a scion is the cutting grafted onto a rootstock, and grafting is a standard bonsai technique, used for example to add branches to pines and junipers. So two gardening words line up in sound and in subject.”- Claude
Lol
That totally sucks. Thanks for providing more details.
Makes you wonder about the mathematicians who are also saying similar things.
Picasso apocryphally said "good artists copy, great artists steal"
> Imagine how they must feel about their work being deliberately copied wholesale and intentionally presented as someone else’s.
Nobody copies from a mid-tier product.
As someone who worked in open source till recently, I've seen a copycat as validation that my idea was better than what they could come up with on their own.
All those people now have evidence that their approach is the best for an AI native future.
The interesting point is that there is overlap in personnel, so this is less of copied homework, more that Anthropic hired some good people who knew a good solution that worked.
But from a pure AI lens, this is what we're doing - putting great ideas into one system and now everyone can drink from that well.
The bad part is that the well has a coin meter next to it, rather than it being a commons. So the fruits of that is not distributed to the people who planted those seeds. This is also happening too fast that the people whose work is getting redistributed to others are still not done being compensated for their work.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" doesn't seem to me to about how wholesale the copying is but that the copy exceeds the original in creativity, beauty, or some other quality so much that it displaces the original, and makes the original seem like the inferior copy.
In that case copying something that is merely mediocre in most respects but has one outstanding quality, and generally exceeding it, makes sense.
I'm not sure any of that applies here except maybe that Anthropic might be more poised to make anything they publish suddenly very famous.
This is how I understood the quote as well, albeit there will always be a significant overlap between inspiration and imitation, and plagiarism is kind of a normal human thing to do. [0]
[0] https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_omersmote.htm
How do you feel about the adobe cloned products?
Related:
Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694
It's well known that AI companies shamelessly steal whatever to drum up hype for their company. From their perspective you the problem for trying to stop their hype train.
Although I'm totally on board of the high-level points,
> This remains yet another shameful example of large AI companies appropriating the commons and presenting others’ work as their own.
If you work at Meta which is, you know, one of large (aspiring) AI companies, a bit of self awareness might help boost your credibility a bit more.
The Anthropic article [1] has author names as initials or first names,and I thought it was to prevent talent pouching, but now other possible intentions come to my mind...
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-con...