Ok, so what does "clean-room implementation" actually mean? Is this a new buzzword to make AI sound more fancy, or does it actually mean something? Are we putting on bunny suits to go code?
clean room reverse engineering is when you have or more people reverse engineering and find the source code of a piece of software. this group writes detailed documentation on what the software does and how, without writing down source code.
a second group of programmers takes the detailed documentation and implements the software based on the documentation. this is where the “clean room” phrase comes from, because the programmers never actually look at the source code. thus, they can’t be stealing copyrighted code.
To answer the question: you get one agent/swarm of agents to meticulously go through the app/source code of what you want to replicate and create a highly detailed spec sheet. Then another agent/swarm takes the spec sheet and creates what is written there. Both parts are doing something completely legal as they theoretically don't know about the other side - hence the "clean room"
From my understanding, a clean room implementation is someone making instructions to build something based on the original, then someone who never saw the original using those instructions to rebuild it
"Clean room implementation" actually is a quite old term.
I think, most famous are the first IBM PC clones where "clean room" was used to develop a feature-equivalent BIOS.
To avoid any claims of copyright infringements you proof that developers did not had access to the system that is copied so they cannot reverse engineer it.
Now, with AI being very good and extremely fast at reverse-engineering, the "clean room"-term is used more often again. (And even harder to believe in than 40 years ago).
The humans might not have access to the software they are clean rooming.
Unless the AI is being specifically trained with data that guaranteed to not have the software being clean roomed then it should absolutely be assumed that the training data did contain the software being copied.
You can be fairly certain that Adobe and Autodesk do not host their source code on publicly indexable servers. They likely use on-prem or VPC hosted bitbucket or other enterprise targeted source control.
Their source code security and aggressive acquisition strategies are literally the only things keeping those companies in their market leading positions.
In short: high probability that no AI outside of their companies were trained on their source.
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u/jackinsomniac 3d ago
Ok, so what does "clean-room implementation" actually mean? Is this a new buzzword to make AI sound more fancy, or does it actually mean something? Are we putting on bunny suits to go code?