the wild tale of OpenAI vs. Open AI
Guy Ravine’s Open AI (with a space) owns a trademark and website that OpenAI (no space) wants. What can their lawsuits tell us about the future of AI—and who wins in Silicon Valley?
archive: https://archive.ph/n2Jwi
The countersuit went so far as to ask the court to force Altman to “change its deceptive and misleading name to ClosedAI or a different more appropriate name.”
top kek
The guy (pun not intended) seems honestly as decent as you might hope for in a serial entrepreneur. Maybe a bit naive for expecting better from the players involved, but to me he comes off as endearingly earnest.
This, as it happens, is the nearly identical contention of Musk, in a federal lawsuit filed on Aug. 5 accusing OpenAI, Altman and Brockman of deceiving him into giving $44 million to a nonprofit that isn’t.
That was a wild ride of an article. It's also a good showcase of why it's usually not the best tech that wins, but who can secure the funding and the marketing.
A social app for uploading and swiping through short videos is not technically all that impressive. It takes quite a bit of infrastructure to scale and implement well, but it wasn't exactly science fiction in the early 2010s. He was not the only one around that time with a similar idea, anyone remember Vine? Ultimately, Snapchat and TikTok (née Musical.ly) had the bigger backing and more successful marketing. Maybe ten years from now the same idea will have been reinvented and people will point out what TikTok is today.
I remember the signs of a new AI spring from 2015 when DeepDream was in the news. It's entirely expected that a techie serial entrepreneur with an Open Source mindset would have tried to foster open collaboration in a potential new and exciting AI renaissance. For all his techbro tendencies I think his goals for his Open AI project seem laudable enough and he's entirely correct in blaming OpenAI for not living up to its name. It's not the biggest issue we should have with OpenAI -- being transparent about their research and open sourcing their products wouldn't make them environmentally sustainable or morally fair to us mortals who have to abide by copyright law -- but it's a legitimate point.
I expected a story of a patent/trademark troll idea guy but this certainly went places.
this is a bit like wailing in desperation because big oil stole from you the idea of using tetraethyllead in gasoline
He professed to have invented the video-sharing technology later made famous by Snapchat and TikTok.
Have a heart… the guy’s side-hustle in fluorocarbon refrigerants got poached, too.
