Zuck, ConnectU, and intellectual property in the age of vibecoding
Yesterday, I watched The Social Network. I first saw it when it was released 16 years ago—writing that sentence just made me feel old. It was interesting to see Jesse Eisenberg’s masterful portrayal of Zuckerberg.
I found myself wondering if Zuckerberg is nearly as much of a jerk as the movie portrays. He probably is, given Meta’s footprint in the world and the "everybody-competes-with-everybody" culture the company promotes. This is pretty well-known in the tech world.
The movie’s ending is brilliant. The guy who founded a company that so profoundly affected our world (mostly for the worse, in my opinion) is revealed to be just another insecure, socially awkward, and likely lonely human being.
A pivotal point in Meta’s history was when the Winklevoss twins sued Zuckerberg, alleging that he stole the idea for the ConnectU social network to create "The Facebook." In the movie, Zuckerberg’s character argues that no portion of ConnectU’s source code was used. Did the lawyers actually go through the source code at the time? How did they know? To be honest, I haven’t studied the details, and I don’t care that much. My point is that the movie got me thinking about how LLMs are impacting intellectual property.
We live in an age where one can concoct pretty fancy source code using "incantations" (prompts) directed at oracles (LLMs). This is known as "vibecoding," a term coined by Andrej Karpathy. Think about this hypothetical scenario: A vibecoder uses an LLM to create an app. Depending on your incantation, you can create fancy code out of a vacuum, like an interactive map of Minnesota coffee shops, a multiplayer online clone of Katamari Damacy, or even a C compiler capable of compiling the Linux kernel (seriously). Now, imagine our vibecoder ends up profiting tremendously from this app. What they don't know is that the LLM-generated source code is full of proprietary code they don't have a license for. Who is at fault here: the clueless vibecoder or the company behind the LLM?
Furthermore, when an AI generates code inspired by your incantations, is that code regulated by the agreements you accepted (but didn’t read) when you signed up for ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever LLM you use? What about when you use an AI via a third-party API? There are so many fascinating questions.