Technology giant Nvidia, whose chips power artificial intelligence, has been sued and is facing a lawsuit from a group of authors who said it used their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform. The Nvidia lawsuit filed by Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Stewart O’Nan said their works were part of a dataset of about 196,640 books that helped train NeMo to simulate ordinary written language.
This was before being taken down in October “due to reported copyright infringement.”
Nvidia sued by authors
In a proposed class action filed on Friday night in San Francisco federal court, the authors said the takedown reflects Nvidia’s having “admitted” it trained NeMo on the dataset, and thereby infringed their copyrights.
The authors have sued Nvidia and are seeking unspecified damages for people in the U.S. whose copyrighted works helped train NeMo’s so-called large language models in the last three years.
Among the works covered by the lawsuit against Nvidia are Keene’s 2008 novel “Ghost Walk,” Nazemian’s 2019 novel “Like a Love Story,” and O’Nan’s 2007 novella “Last Night at the Lobster.”
Litigation by writers
There was no comment by Nvidia on being sued by the authors. Lawyers for the authors did not immediately respond to requests on Sunday for additional comment.
The lawsuit by the authors drags Nvidia into a growing body of litigation by writers, as well as the New York Times, over generative AI, which creates new content based on inputs such as text, images and sounds.
The case is Nazemian et al v Nvidia Corp, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 24-01454.
NeMo AI
Nvidia touts NeMo as a fast and affordable way to adopt generative AI.
The NeMo Megatron models were hosted on a website called Hugging Face that included a description of AI models’ training dataset, which stated that the model was trained on The Pile. The Pile’s Books3 dataset was listed on Hugging Face until October 2023, when the dataset was removed with a message that it “is defunct and no longer accessible due to reported copyright infringement.”
AI’s rise has made Nvidia a favorite of investors.
Companies sued like Nvidia
Other companies sued over the technology have included OpenAI, which created the AI platform ChatGPT, and its partner Microsoft.
Stock update
The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker Nvidia’s stock price has risen almost 600% since the end of 2022, giving Nvidia a market value of nearly $2.2 trillion.
