No, this is definitely not "clean room". An actual clean room clone requires a very competent analysis team that writes a spec. A ton of legal people that verify the spec does not contain descriptions of the original code and that can attest so under oath. And an implementation team that has never seen the original code and only gets said spec. It is a huge and very fragile undertaking. An AI that may have seen the code does not cut it in any way.

But remember the date. This is a really good April's fool's because it is so believable and many mindless AI fans will take it as real.

If they write it on April 1st? Sure.

Not at all. If somebody actually took this serious, they would likely be in a world of legal hurt. But remember the date...

Indeed. The beauty of this April fools is that it has a high level of credibility ... to the stupid.

Yeah, no idea why that happens...

While true, legally it makes no difference whether you steal the sources or the binary. It is still stolen. And a clean-room implementation requires the code-writers to never have seen the original in any form. You cannot have an engineer analyze the original and then write a copy. Hence it is immediately plausible that having an AI train on the original or ingest it in a query and then writing a new version is not a clean-room clone (and only those are legal per default) at all.

I do agree on the slop.

It does indeed in no way fulfill the requirements for a "clean room" clone. And, worse, even if it did, there was no way to prove that. For a proof of a "clean room" reimplementation, you need to demonstrate conclusively that the implementors never came into contact with the original code.

Also remember that the result has no now copyright and ownership. It either has none at all or retains the original one.

And that is what makes this satirical: The result has no new copyright whatsoever and it only give the appearance of working. It is also unclear whether it is actually legal to do or whether it may remain partially or fully under the original copyright and ownership due to the model probably having being trained on the original OSS code.

As some people will probably take this seriously, it bears pointing out that this is a technological and legal nightmare. It is a very cool satirical project though.

They will just get worse service. Anything else would be un-American.

Only with a server in between. This is not P2P. Hence only outgoing sockets and only in very few places.

Apparently these noobs have never heard of it.

Say, 200 years or more. But I am sure they will get investors from rich morons that are afraid to die.

Identifying backdoors in an office package is relatively easy, since it has no business communicating over the network in most cases and it certainly has no business opening server-sockers, ever. For the general case, things are more complex.

Thus practice may be very bad for your health. Not that these "executives" care, but you should.

Yes. And that is how AWS got their 13 hour (?) outage. That outage was probably more expensive than what they can save in cost over a year or several by using LLMs as surrogate coders.