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FILE PHOTO: OpenAI logo is seen near computer motherboard in this illustration taken January 8, 2024.
Newspapers fight back, file suit against OpenAI
Eight major newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Tuesday in federal court, alleging copyright infringement. The group includes major regional newspapers, such as the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel.
While many publishers have struck lucrative licensing deals with AI companies, allowing them to train their large language models by scraping their websites, others have opted for litigation, most notably the New York Times. The Grey Lady sued OpenAI in December, alleging the Sam Altman-led startup violated federal copyright law by illegally training its model on Times journalism and spitting out responses indistinguishable from what people can find on their website or in their print newspaper. OpenAI has said the suit is “without merit.”
The Alden group also followed the Times' lead in suing Microsoft, too. Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest investor, having poured $13 billion into the startup, and uses the GPT suite of language models in its Copilot assistant and Bing search products.If a large language model proprietor is found to have violated copyright statutes, it could pose an existential threat to that model — meaning it may have to start training a new one from scratch.
FILE PHOTO: Tesla and SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk pauses during an in-conversation event with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London, Britain, Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023.
Musk takes OpenAI to court
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman late last week, saying that they breached the terms of a contract by prioritizing their profits over the public good. In 2015, Musk helped found and fund OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab-turned-industry leader. He resigned as co-chair of the company’s nonprofit board of directors in 2018, citing conflicts of interest with his own company, Tesla, which was investing heavily in AI.
Now, Musk alleges that OpenAI violated the terms under which he gave money to OpenAI, but no one seems to have written down those terms.
The Verge points out that the complaint hinges on the violation of a “Founding Agreement,” an alleged oral contract that Musk feels was formed in the course of business discussions. If a court finds that a contract was formed – and courts aren’t usually friendly to oral contracts – Musk is requesting that the court compel OpenAI to revert back to its original nonprofit mission, including making research data publicly available, instead of the profit-motivated one that’s turned it into a $80 billion juggernaut.
There’s one other thing that Musk-watchers should keep in mind: Musk currently runs an AI startup of his own, xAI, which has a chatbot called Grok. This means his business directly competes with OpenAI. Is it any wonder he’s resorting to litigation that could take OpenAI down a peg?
File photo dated May 16, 2023 shows Samuel Altman, CEO, OpenAI, offers his opening statement during a Senate Committee hearing
OpenAI’s Altman incident under investigation
Two investigations may soon shed light on one of the biggest mysteries in Silicon Valley: Why was Sam Altman fired from OpenAI?
To recap, the OpenAI board fired Altman in November, saying he was not “consistently candid in his communications,” but it failed to provide specifics (the big mystery). OpenAI’s staff and lead investor, Microsoft, immediately protested the ouster and successfully campaigned for Altman’s reinstatement – and for fresh faces on the nonprofit board.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating whether OpenAI misled its investors in firing Altman. Meanwhile, the law firm WilmerHale is conducting an internal investigation of the Altman firing and will soon present its findings to the current board of directors, which commissioned the review.
Altman’s alleged deceit may have something to do with his plans to raise trillions of dollars for a chip venture, something that’s come to light in the months since this debacle. We have our ear to the ground for where the investigations are headed, and what it could mean for the giant of genAI.
How OpenAI CEO Sam Altman became the most influential voice in tech
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has become the poster child for AI, but it's difficult to understand his motivations.
Artificial intelligence was a major buzzword at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was the hottest ticket in town. CEOs and business leaders crowded into sold-out conference halls to hear his take on the current explosion in generative AI and where the technology is headed.
On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer sat down with AI expert and author Azeem Azhar and asked why everyone, both at Davos and in the tech community as a whole, seems to be pinning their hopes and fears about the future of AI on Altman. Azhar says that there are actually a lot of similarities between the individual and the technology he works on.
“I like to think of [Altman] as someone who has been fine-tuned to absolute perfection,” Azhar explains, “And fine-tuning is what you do to an AI model to get it to go from spewing out garbage to being as wonderful as ChatGPT is. And I think Sam’s gone through the same process.”
Watch full episode: How AI is changing the world of work
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on US public television every week. Check local listings.
A slogan related to Artificial Intelligence is displayed on a screen in the Intel pavilion during the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
AI takes center stage at Davos
Artificial intelligence is a hot topic in Davos, Switzerland, this week, as government officials and industry leaders gather for the 54th edition of the World Economic Forum summit. There are more than 30 scheduled events about AI concerning jobs, healthcare, ethics, chips, and access.
Among the most "sought-after" attendees are AI executives, including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Inflection AI's Mustafa Suleyman, Google DeepMind's Lila Ibrahim, Cohere's Aidan Gomez, and Mistral AI's Florian Bressand. Altman, who will speak about the benefits and risks of AI on Thursday, gave a recent podcast interview with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, sharing his thoughts on AI regulation.
Altman said that he's interested in the idea of a "global regulatory body that looks at those super-powerful systems" – ones far more powerful than current models like GPT-4 – and suggested that the IAEA, the nuclear regulatory model, might be a good model. "This needs a global agency of some sort because of the potential for global impact.”
The OpenAI-Sam Altman drama: Why should you care?
Taylor Owen, professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University and director of its Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy, co-hosts GZERO AI, our new weekly video series intended to help you keep up and make sense of the latest news on the AI revolution. In this episode of the series, Taylor Owen takes a look at the OpenAI-Sam Altman drama.
Hi, I'm Taylor Owen. This is GZERO AI. So if you're watching this video, then like me, you're probably glued to your screen over the past week, watching the psychodrama play out at OpenAI, a company literally at the center of the current AI moment we're in.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was kicked out of his company by his own board of directors. Under a week later, he was back as CEO, and all but one of those board members was gone. All of this would be amusing, and it certainly was in a glib sort of way, if the consequences weren't so profound. I've been thinking a lot about how to make sense of all this, and I keep coming back to this profound sense of deja vu.
First, though, a quick recap. We don't know all of the details, but it really does seem to be the case that at the core of this conflict was a tension between two different views of what OpenAI was and will be in the future. Remember, OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, and a nonprofit because it was choosing a mission of building technologies to benefit all of humanity over a private corporate mission of increasing value for shareholders. When they started running out of money, though, a couple of years later, they embedded a for-profit entity within this nonprofit structure so that they could capitalize on the commercial value of the products that the nonprofit was building. This is where the tension lied, between the incentives of a for-profit engine and the values and mission of a nonprofit board structure.
All of this can seem really new. OpenAI was building legitimately groundbreaking technologies, technologies that could transform our world. But I think the problem and the wider problem here is not a new one. This is where I was getting deja vu. Back in the early days of Web 2.0, there was also a huge amount of excitement over a new disruptive technology. In this case, the power of social media. In some ways, events like the Arab Spring were very similar to the emergence of ChatGPT, a seismic of event that demonstrated to broader society the power of an emerging technology.
Now I spent the last 15 years studying the emergence of social media, and in particular how we as societies can balance the immense benefits and upside of these technologies with also the clear downside risks as they emerged. I actually think we got a lot of that balance wrong. It's times like this when a new technology emerges that we need to think carefully about what lessons we can learn from the past. I want to highlight three.
First, we need to be really clear-eyed about who has power in the technological infrastructure we're deploying. In the case of OpenAI, it seems very clear that the profit incentives won over the more broader social mandate. Power is also, though, who controls infrastructure. In this case, Microsoft played a big role. They controlled the compute infrastructure, and they wielded this power to come out on top in this turmoil.
Second, we need to bring the public into this discussion. Ultimately, a technology will only be successful if it has legitimate citizen buy-in, if it has a social license. What are citizens supposed to think when they hear the very people building these technologies disagreeing over their consequences? Ilya Sutskever, for example, said just a month ago, "If you value intelligence over all human qualities, you're going to have a bad time," when talking about the future of AI. This kind of comment coming from the very people that are building the technologies is just exacerbating an already deep insecurity many people feel about the future. Citizens need to be allowed and be enabled and empowered to weigh into the conversation about the technologies that are being built on their behalf.
Finally, we simply need to get the governance right this time. We didn't last time. For over 20 years, we've largely left the social web unregulated, and it's had disastrous consequences. This means not being confused by technical or systemic complexity masking lobbying efforts. It means applying existing laws and regulations first ... In the case of AI, things like copyright, online safety rules, data privacy rules, competition policy ... before we get too bogged down in big, large-scale AI governance initiatives. We just can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We need to iterate, experiment, and countries need to learn from each other in how they step into this complex new world of AI governance.
Unfortunately, I worry we're repeating some of the same mistakes of the past. Once again, we're moving fast and we're breaking things. If the new board of OpenAI is any indication about how they're thinking about governance and how the AI world in general values and thinks about governance, there's even more to worry about. Three white men calling the shots at a tech company that could very well transform our world. We've been here before, and it doesn't end well. Our failure to adequately regulate social media had huge consequence. While the upside of AI is undeniable, it's looking like we're making many of the same mistakes, only this time the consequences could be even more dire.
I'm Taylor Owen, and thanks for watching.
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“Like asking the butcher how to test his meat”: Q&A on the OpenAI fiasco and the need for regulation
AI-generated art courtesy of Midjourney
The near-collapse of OpenAI, the world’s foremost artificial intelligence company, shocked the world earlier this month. Its nonprofit board of directors fired its high-profile and influential CEO, Sam Altman, on Friday, Nov. 17, for not being “consistently candid” with them. But the board never explained its rationale. Altman campaigned to get his job back and was joined in his pressure campaign by OpenAI lead investor Microsoft and 700 of OpenAI’s 770 employees. Days later, multiple board members resigned, new ones were installed, and Altman returned to his post.
To learn more about what the blowup means for global regulation, we spoke to Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament who serves as the international policy director of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University and as president of the Cyber Peace Institute. Schaake is also a host of the GZERO AI video series.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
GZERO: What are you taking away from the OpenAI debacle?
Schaake: This incident makes it crystal clear that companies alone are not the legitimate or most fit stakeholder to govern over powerful AI. The confrontation between the board and the executive leadership at OpenAI seems to have at least included disagreement about the impact of next-generation models on society. To weigh what is and is not an acceptable risk to accept, there needs to be public research and scrutiny, based on public policy. I am hoping the soap opera we watched at OpenAI underlines the need for democratic governance, not corporate governance.
Was there any element that was particularly concerning to you?
The governance processes seem underdeveloped in light of the stakes. And there are probably many other parts of OpenAI that lack the maturity to deal with the many impacts their products will have around the world. I am even more concerned than I was two weeks ago.
Microsoft exerted its power by pressuring OpenAI's nonprofit board to partially resign and reinstate Altman. Should we be concerned about Microsoft's influence in the AI industry?
I do not like the fact that with the implosions of OpenAI's governance, the entire notion of giving less power to investors may now lose support. For Microsoft to throw around the weight of its financial resources is not surprising, but also hardly reassuring. Profit motives all too often clash with the public interest, and the competition between companies investing in AI is almost as fierce as that between the developers of AI applications. The drive to outgame competitors rather than to consider multiple stakeholders and factors in society is a perverse one. But instead of looking at the various companies in the ecosystem, we need to look to government to assert itself, and to develop a mechanism of independent oversight.
Sam Altman has been an incredibly visible ambassador for this technology in the US and on the world stage. How would you describe the role he played over the past year with regard to shaping global regulation of AI?
Altman has become the face of the industry, for better and worse. He has made conflicting statements on how he sees regulation as impacting the company. In the same week, he encouraged Congress to adopt regulation, and threatened OpenAI would leave the EU because of the EU AI Act – regulation. It is a reminder for anyone who needs it that a brilliant businessman should not be the one in charge of deciding on regulation. This anecdote also shows we need a more sophisticated debate about regulation. Just claiming to be in favor or against means little, it is about the specific objectives of a given piece of regulation, the trade offs, and the enforcement.
In your view, has his lobbying been successful? Was his message more successful with certain regulators as opposed to others? Did politicians listen to him?
He cleverly presented himself as an ally to regulators, when he appeared before Congress. That is a lesson he may well have learned from Microsoft. In that sense, Altman got a much more friendly reception than Mark Zuckerberg ever got. It seems members of Congress listened and even asked him for advice on how AI should be regulated. It is like asking the butcher how to test his meat. I hope politicians stop asking CEOs for advice and rather feel empowered to consider many more experts and people impacted by the rollout of AI, to serve the public interest, and to prevent harms, protect rights, competition, and national security.
Given what you know now, do you think Altman will continue being the posterboy for AI and an active player in shaping AI regulation?
There are already different camps with regard to what success or danger looks like around AI. There will surely be tribes that see Altman as having come out stronger from this episode. Others will underline the very cynical dealings we saw on display. We should not forget that there is a lot of detail we do not even know about what went down.
I feel like everyone is the meme of Michael Jackson eating popcorn, fascinated by this bizarre series of events, desperately trying to understand what's going on. What are you hoping to learn next? What answers do the people at the center of this ordeal owe to the public?
Actually, we should not be distracted by the entertainment aspect of this soap of a confrontation, complete with cliffhangers and plot twists. Instead, if the board, which had a mandate emphasizing the public good, has concerns about OpenAI’s new models, they should speak out. Even if the steps taken appeared hasty and haphazardly, we must assume there were reasons behind their concerns.
If you were back in the European Parliament, how would you be responding?
I would work on regulation, before, during, and after this drama. In other words, I would not have changed my activities because of it.
What final message would you like to leave us with?
Maybe just to repeat that this saga underlines the key problems of a lack of transparency, of democratic rules, and of independent oversight over these companies. If anyone needed a refresher of why those are urgently needed, we can thank the OpenAI board and Sam Altman for sounding the alarm bell once more.
Sam Altman, who has just been ousted as CEO of OpenAI, is seen here testifying before a Senate Judiciary Privacy, Technology & the Law Subcommittee back in May 2023.
A chaotic shakeup at OpenAI
OpenAI’s board of directors fired Sam Altman as CEO on Friday — a shock decision with ramifications for the entire AI industry. After Altman and allies campaigned throughout the weekend to get him reinstated, the board affirmed its decision and brought in former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear to lead the company responsible for ChatGPT. Trouble is, that there may be no one left to lead.
Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in the for-profit arm of OpenAI but did not hold a seat on its nonprofit board of directors, was blindsided by Altman’s ouster. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman are joining Microsoft to “lead a new advanced AI research team.” Nadella may not have been able to control OpenAI’s board, but he can poach their best talent for his own gain.
Microsoft may soon have most of OpenAI’s team. More than 700 of the 770 employees of OpenAI have signed an open letter threatening to quit unless the board resigns and Altman is reinstated. They all have open offers to join Microsoft. That includes Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer, whom the board briefly appointed interim CEO on Friday before bringing in Shear, an outsider. A group of investors, including Thrive Capital, is still pressuring the board to reinstate Altman, and Nadella said that, despite his offer to absorb Altman and his loyalists, he would welcome this outcome.
OpenAI’s board has still not explained why Altman was fired. It merely said Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board” and that the four members had lost confidence in him. In effect, the board was exercising its duty to put the organization's mission above profit motive or even employee demands: OpenAI has a unique setup where a small nonprofit board controls a massive for-profit venture. While it was within its rights to terminate Altman, it has not adequately explained to anyone why it did so.
The schism at OpenAI is of seismic importance: Before Friday, OpenAI was an unstoppable industry leader with the most visible CEO in the industry, and it was backed by one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies. What would OpenAI be without most of its staff? Did Microsoft waste its $13 billion investment or functionally acquire OpenAI for free? Why does OpenAI co-founder and board member Ilya Sutskever now “deeply regret” firing Altman?
Further, this messy breakup has direct consequences for the technology. OpenAI was on the cutting edge of AI development, and its products are used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. With the company behind it now in disarray, we have to ask: What is the future of ChatGPT? Will a rival outpace it, or will Microsoft build its own version?
Gerald Butts, vice chairman of Eurasia Group, said that the future of AI is somewhat insulated from this dramatic game of musical chairs. “AI development is independent of the personalities involved at this stage,” Butts said. “Overall, this whole episode is a nothing burger.”