'Astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions': NYT vs. OpenAI, Microsoft lawsuit

As we know, the New York Times, uh joining with a bunch of other news organizations, had sued OpenAI and Microsoft and saying that effectively, you were using our content to train your models. And there was some new disclosure related to this lawsuit that is pretty eye opening. And I'm going to read the quote here from this internal Microsoft document that came out. It was in 2023. and this says quote, millions of people around the world will soon consider large models, quote, hoovering up all of their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.

They say it right there. that they

They know what it is.

They know what it is. Now, Microsoft says, oh, this guy was a consultant, he wasn't, um, even though I think his title is Director of Applied Science at Microsoft.

Right. But he doesn't represent the house view.

That's what they say. But there's some other quotes in there that are seem to be supportive of this. You know, and and it feels like there will have to be this reckoning with how these models were trained and you know, will there be a big settlement between these companies and the media companies? Um, it wouldn't shock me if that was the outcome.

And then we got on the OpenAI side, Greg Brockman, there was a quote where uh someone said to him, look, basically we found a way around the New York Times paywall. Right.

And and Greg Brockman writes back and says, okay, great. Come on. Yeah. And you have to figure, if you're a logical mind, you have to figure all this is going to come out in discovery. All of this is going to be laid public. And so how do you, how do you then turn around and say, no, no, no, no, no, this is actually a positive for society. We're doing a good thing here.

I mean, and this is just one example of of sort of the friction between how these companies operate and the rest of the world.

Absolutely.

You know, so and and it sort of comes back to this idea of whether um, we are seeing social harm or social good more broadly from these companies.

Right. That's right.

I'm astonished that the legal team at OpenAI allowed this to go as far as it has. It's like game set match at this point. Uh so that's one thing. The hypocrisy because they're claiming that the Chinese model companies are stealing their information. Uh so they are will eventually be in the in the not too distant future, our guess, a major settlement.

It also brings up to me the just the idea that when these guys go public, investors are going to be excited. But over the next few years, it seems like there is so much litigation risk facing these companies. Talk about copyright, one, but also if any of Dario's predictions of the bio weaponry or the real terror threats we have with the power of the technology, what are they going to be liable for? And what are they going to be able to make the Facebook argument of, well, we're just a platform. That's going to be a huge litigation question for investors.