More on Anthropic's Scion ripping off Mononoke(sunshowers.io) Redesigning source control at Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073633 (996 comments) Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694 (149 comments) |
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. [edit: this is done]
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 using the same words.
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.
Maybe the next solution in search of a problem that anthropic and any other frontier data harvester should be looking to solve is accurate attribution to those "inspirations".
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-con...
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.
Yes, copying takes a lot of research. It takes a lot of effort to collect OSS data, and a huge amount of research is needed.
> However, after publishing the post I privately received confirmation that Scion intentionally and blatantly ripped off Mononoke, and in particular that there was overlap in personnel.
I come out of this that Anthropic actually ripped off Mononoke, but did so in a joyful and inspired manner. Maybe the prompt to Claude has a trailing smiling emoji.
As a human who is deeply familiar with the codebase, what percentage of Scion's codebase would you estimate is directly inspired by Mononoke?
This system was actually built incrementally over several months and did not start out as a full VCS -- it started as a read-only service that ingested data from our Git repo to take pressure off of CI and other tools needing to materialize checkouts for certain types of repo/graph questions. Even when we did decide to go all the way, we were operating in a hybrid Git/Scion world for months during the migration and the path to get there made the system and code very unique to our infrastructure.
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...
They have not made anything revolutionary, they have only ever made evolutionary derivatives of medium-to-high quality with no accreditation or financial support for the original authors (at least not without being forced into a class-action over it).
Hard disagree. Claude and other frontier models are clearly a huge accomplishment, are already changing the world, and continue to get better.
Despite the real innovation, the way Anthropic communicates their work often comes across as disingenuous.
"Our models wrote a new VCS" is very different from "Our models adapted existing VCS to our bespoke needs". Both are impressive, so why over inflate the claim?
Same thing happened with the Bun Rust rewrite.
huh
Lol
Redesigning source control at Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073633 (996 comments)
Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694 (149 comments)
> 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.
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, unfortunately, the largest underpinning issue with a lot of software currently being released from AI-heavy engineering workflows. Even if it wasn't done explicitly, (almost) everything modern LLMs spit out is built on top of decades of prior failures by humans; even if something is "novel", it's trivially easy for the LLM to start with excluding all the paths that failed before (that humans were generous enough to share freely)
tldr; almost everything these days is a copy, even if we don't know what it's a copy of (yet).
I don't know how the author is pissed off. Only thing the author aware is Claude agents researched Mononoke solution, then it claims a closed source repo is a plagiarism case.
I don't get it, and I'm seeing more and more cope here.
Makes you wonder about the mathematicians who are also saying similar things.
Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke
> 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.
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.
Also, sorry, but Facebook has been evil for way longer than eight years.
The other interesting part of this is the amount of time and effort it took Anthropic to do this, despite the fact that they were just copying an existing design - 5 months and (from another thread) 7 humans... Why couldn't one of their coding models/agents have done this by itself given the detailed specification? It's understandable that an LLM can't design a system like this by itself, but a bit surprising that even given the design is apparently can't code it up by itself either (else why did it take 5 months!).
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-con...
If you think the license was breached and code was copied, that’s one thing.
But claiming ownership over an abstract idea in a project you open sourced seems epistemically confused to me. You don’t get to do that, there is no obligation from anyone to credit what OSS projects they drew inspiration from, as long as they comply with the license.
Having said that it’s nice to give credit to your inspirations, and Anthropic very clearly did:
> Source control for huge monorepos has prior art, notably Google’s Piper and Meta’s Sapling, so we were able to build Scion with their hard-won lessons in mind
This is just needless drama, nobody at Anthropic did anything wrong here.
Exactly. This is the same type of nonsense nerd drama that happens sometimes between various Linux distro fans.