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. [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.
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.
As the longest serving and most senior member (now ex-member) of the Facebook source control team, I had no problem with your post. I'm just happy to see the ideas and technology helping move the industry forward.
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?
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.
I'm finding this all really much ado about nothing. What does it matter how much overlap there is? I laud nickg for clearing the air because I personally would've just let everyone stew if it were up to me. All this scrutiny is happening because "big AI taking everything" and it's ultimately pointless. They made a tool that has a lot from an existing tool, yes. They also stated where some of the inspiration came from, which is directly related to the project the author is screaming about. Blog post author decides - against their better judgment IMO - to dip a toe in, and suddenly there's drag on that toe, for nothing. This is all just... wild.
While your post sugar coats it in positive words: "joyful", "inspired", and so on, it just largely confirms the accusations in the blog post:
> 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.
> 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...
Is it surprising? The bulk of their work is largely derived from existing works themselves, nothing original, everything probabilistically paraphrased and then post-trained by lowly-paid, ESL workers resulting in the really annoying, mic-droppy writing output. It will never be original, it will never be new, it will always only be derivative.
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).
“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.
The entire thing is beyond confusing. So Anthropic refers to an open-sourced project and credit it in the original article.
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.
My read of the author's position is that the people who built Mononoke at Meta did all the hard engineering work that made Scion possible, while the work that happened at Anthropic was mere code-monkeying unworthy of note. This is decidedly not the sense you would get from reading Anthropic's blog post, so they feel that that post misrepresented what happened. I am skeptical that this is really an accurate characterization, but I can see how a person might get there, especially if they were involved in the work at Meta and so have a natural bias towards weighting its significance more heavily.
Honestly I think this is a really bad look and sour grapes from the OP. Sapling is GPL. You open sourced it. What does “rip off” mean here?
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.
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.
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.
I mean they were evil from the beginning; my point is that she has has had plenty of time working at a non-evil company to not be dragged down for it. One could serve less time in prison for armed bank robbery
How does Anthropic justify blatantly ripping off another company's work like this, especially without credit, then keep on whining about "distillation" when they suspect anyone else is merely using the output of their LLM in ways they don't like.
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!).
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. [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.
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.
As the longest serving and most senior member (now ex-member) of the Facebook source control team, I had no problem with your post. I'm just happy to see the ideas and technology helping move the industry forward.
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.
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.
Just a way to separate one's personal comments from their professional ones, like a work email address.
You also register -openai -deepmind -meta and -xsi
They throw it away?
Then there will be no more time spent trying to manage Orange Site public opinions regarding Anthropic.
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?
Very little, overall.
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.
I'm finding this all really much ado about nothing. What does it matter how much overlap there is? I laud nickg for clearing the air because I personally would've just let everyone stew if it were up to me. All this scrutiny is happening because "big AI taking everything" and it's ultimately pointless. They made a tool that has a lot from an existing tool, yes. They also stated where some of the inspiration came from, which is directly related to the project the author is screaming about. Blog post author decides - against their better judgment IMO - to dip a toe in, and suddenly there's drag on that toe, for nothing. This is all just... wild.
Looking deeper, I think Ant really did copy the work. I don't think you should feel ashamed or defend it by saying that a lot of research is required.
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.
While your post sugar coats it in positive words: "joyful", "inspired", and so on, it just largely confirms the accusations in the blog post:
> 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.
Do you actually have a specific ethical line in mind that you think Anthropic was on the wrong side of here?
> 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...
Is it surprising? The bulk of their work is largely derived from existing works themselves, nothing original, everything probabilistically paraphrased and then post-trained by lowly-paid, ESL workers resulting in the really annoying, mic-droppy writing output. It will never be original, it will never be new, it will always only be derivative.
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).
> 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
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.
The entire thing is beyond confusing. So Anthropic refers to an open-sourced project and credit it in the original article.
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.
My read of the author's position is that the people who built Mononoke at Meta did all the hard engineering work that made Scion possible, while the work that happened at Anthropic was mere code-monkeying unworthy of note. This is decidedly not the sense you would get from reading Anthropic's blog post, so they feel that that post misrepresented what happened. I am skeptical that this is really an accurate characterization, but I can see how a person might get there, especially if they were involved in the work at Meta and so have a natural bias towards weighting its significance more heavily.
Recent and related:
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)
How do you feel about the adobe cloned products?
That totally sucks. Thanks for providing more details.
Makes you wonder about the mathematicians who are also saying similar things.
Honestly I think this is a really bad look and sour grapes from the OP. Sapling is GPL. You open sourced it. What does “rip off” mean here?
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.
> Sapling is GPL. You open sourced it. What does “rip off” mean here?
Exactly. This is the same type of nonsense nerd drama that happens sometimes between various Linux distro fans.
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.
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.
The author hasn't worked at Meta for eight years
Then I guess he never worked at Meta! https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/facebook-company-is-now-me...
Also, sorry, but Facebook has been evil for way longer than eight years.
I mean they were evil from the beginning; my point is that she has has had plenty of time working at a non-evil company to not be dragged down for it. One could serve less time in prison for armed bank robbery
tbh i think anyone who has worked at meta probably should serve that much time in prison...
Yeah, I simply could not give a shit less about any of this. Everyone involved has furthered the agenda of awful companies that harm society.
What you're watching is basically if 3 Warlmart variants showed up in your town to fight over who gets to run the mom and pop shops off the internet.
How does Anthropic justify blatantly ripping off another company's work like this, especially without credit, then keep on whining about "distillation" when they suspect anyone else is merely using the output of their LLM in ways they don't like.
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!).
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...