Anthropic’s Scion is closely impressed by Mononoke · sunshowers

Discuss on Hacker News or Lobsters.

Here is Anthropic describing (archive link) yesterday how their new model management system, Scion, makes use of an idea referred to as “derived knowledge” to make operations like blames extra environment friendly:

Here is me, again in 2022, describing in my Oxide candidate supplies how the Mononoke supply management server I helped construct makes use of an idea referred to as “derived knowledge” to make operations like blames extra environment friendly:

I believe the extent of imitation goes properly past having related insights^{. The proven fact that Sapling was solely credited for “hard-won classes”, and that Mononoke was not talked about in any respect, borders on plagiarism. The submit comes off as Anthropic claiming that Claude designed all this, whereas the truth is that our (extraordinary) crew at Meta got here up with most of the insights that Claude dutifully utilized nearly a decade later. (We checked out loads of prior artwork for Mononoke and Sapling too, from Google’s SrcFS to write-ahead logs in databases.)}

I’m very glad that the imaginative and prescient our crew had again in 2017-18 was so highly effective and enduring — whenever you go in opposition to the grain, you’re all the time a bit uncertain if what you’re doing is genius or insanity, and I believe Mononoke’s design has stood the take a look at of time. And, to be clear, I should not have an issue with Anthropic copying Mononoke’s design. (This is a part of why we put out open supply — to profit humanity by means of the unfold of fine concepts.)

But as LLMs proceed to help in designing new programs, they’re prone to index closely on present designs. Mononoke is open source and in each LLM’s coaching set. If you ask Opus 5.5 or GPT-6 Astra (thanks Matthew Fowle) about prior artwork, they each instantly level out the similarities to Mononoke.

Giving credit score to people who got here earlier than us is now simpler — and extra vital — than ever. There is not an excuse.