Why OpenAI Is at War With an Obscure Idea Man (bloomberg.com) 35
In a David vs. Goliath legal battle, AI powerhouse OpenAI is squaring off against a little-known entrepreneur who claims he conceived the company's name and mission months before its star-studded launch. Guy Ravine, a self-taught programmer with a history of near-misses in tech, registered the domain open.ai in March 2015. He envisioned a collaborative platform to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity. By year's end, Ravine had pitched his "Open AI" concept to industry luminaries and filed for a trademark. Then, in December 2015, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman announced the creation of OpenAI, backed by a promised billion dollars from Elon Musk and others.
The similarity was uncanny -- a non-profit aimed at developing AGI for the public good. "What the f---?" Ravine recalls thinking. He claims his idea was stolen, while OpenAI dismisses him as an opportunistic "troll" and a "fraud." The ensuing legal battle has consumed Ravine's life, Bloomberg Businessweek covers in great detail, and has raised thorny questions about idea ownership in Silicon Valley. It also casts a shadow over OpenAI's origin story as the company, now valued at $157 billion, shifts from its non-profit roots to a for-profit juggernaut. "It's humanity's asset," Ravine insists. "It's not his [Altman's] asset." For now, a judge has barred Ravine from using "Open AI" while the suit proceeds, but the inventor has vowed to fight on against what he calls "the most feared law firm in the world." An amusing excerpt from the story: But Ravine had poked the bear, and as he packed up his house on Aug. 11, 2023, he opened an email from a lawyer at the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, informing him that OpenAI was suing him in federal court over the domain and trademark. "I'm like, what the f---?" Ravine recalls. Altman, he says, "could have had it for free" -- or at least for the cost of a donation. "Instead, he decided to donate millions of dollars to literally the most feared law firm in the world, to sue me."
Again and again in our conversations, he returns to that phrase: "the most feared law firm in the world." Finally, I ask him how he knows this. He turns his laptop toward me and pulls up the email. The signature reads "Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP: Most Feared Law Firm in the World."
The similarity was uncanny -- a non-profit aimed at developing AGI for the public good. "What the f---?" Ravine recalls thinking. He claims his idea was stolen, while OpenAI dismisses him as an opportunistic "troll" and a "fraud." The ensuing legal battle has consumed Ravine's life, Bloomberg Businessweek covers in great detail, and has raised thorny questions about idea ownership in Silicon Valley. It also casts a shadow over OpenAI's origin story as the company, now valued at $157 billion, shifts from its non-profit roots to a for-profit juggernaut. "It's humanity's asset," Ravine insists. "It's not his [Altman's] asset." For now, a judge has barred Ravine from using "Open AI" while the suit proceeds, but the inventor has vowed to fight on against what he calls "the most feared law firm in the world." An amusing excerpt from the story: But Ravine had poked the bear, and as he packed up his house on Aug. 11, 2023, he opened an email from a lawyer at the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, informing him that OpenAI was suing him in federal court over the domain and trademark. "I'm like, what the f---?" Ravine recalls. Altman, he says, "could have had it for free" -- or at least for the cost of a donation. "Instead, he decided to donate millions of dollars to literally the most feared law firm in the world, to sue me."
Again and again in our conversations, he returns to that phrase: "the most feared law firm in the world." Finally, I ask him how he knows this. He turns his laptop toward me and pulls up the email. The signature reads "Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP: Most Feared Law Firm in the World."
OpenAI was already a dubious idea (Score:2)
The claims of "innovation" coming from reading the state of the literature on machine learning in 2016 and then selling it is already a dubious statement.
To then go and say "I thought of doing that too" like it entitles you to anything seems batshit to me. You can do that. Every single tech company did do that.
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Well, he seems to have a legitimate grievance with respect to the fact that they sued him with respect to his using the (let's face it rather generic or at least plainly descriptive) term Open AI which he had been using before they started. That far goes to him. But any idea that you can 'own' the general idea of 'let's set up a foundation to do AI stuff for the public good" is pretty silly.
Re:OpenAI was already a dubious idea (Score:5, Interesting)
People who themselves have no implementation skills tend to overvalue ideas. It's not that having a suitable idea at an opportune time isn't *important*; it's just that at any given time there are more ideas out there that could work than there are people who can get them to work.
Some people who found tech startups want to be Tony Stark, but in reality there's a reason there are no people in the world like that. There would be implementation details in an Iron Man suit that would take many man years of highly skilled labor to make work, like the software. The most advanced fighter jet in the world, the F-35, is not fully operational yet because it's taking years to get the software to work. For many years there were F-35s that were delivered and paid for that couldn't shoot their guns because the software team hadn't got to that yet.
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Bingo. Anybody can think of the obvious. If it's a good idea: a product or service people actually WANT, then a thousand, a million people will have also thought of it. By the time you get to me with your stupid napkin, I'll have a list together of all the other people who got to it first.
Back when I was a startup tech consultant, I wouldn't even meet with anyone who didn't have a proper written business plan. I didn't necessarily care to read it, but if you couldn't make the effort to understand your own p
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Apparently reusing code isn't a thing with these folks.
And people wonder why this jet is the gigantic waste of money that it is. Billions of taxpayer dollars spent and a pilot can't even pull the trigger.
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Joke's on you, I just trademarked blowjob.AI
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So we, as a society, shouldn't let big corporations steal from people just because they have money.
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Yes, but the OpenAI foundation became for-profit a few weeks ago. It was always obvious that's where they wanted to go, but people with certain political leanings were writing long opinion articles about the advent of companies that did stuff purely 'for the good of humanity'. Tesla and SpaceX and HyperLoop got the same treatment about a decade ago when Musk was still an idealist instead of a realist.
If you truly believe they are going to do 'good for humanity' it is bad optics to start suing them for a dom
Re: OpenAI was already a dubious idea (Score:2)
Idealist? Realist? This man has never been anything other than an opportunist... one attuned to exploit others' idealism, particularly slashdot-libertarian crypto bro types who believe technology+greed can solve all of society's ills. All the while, this plastic faced MFer has built a fortune whose cornerstone was grifting taxpayer dollars
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The truth is we see this classism and corruption all the time, incompetent upper class people stealing from the working people
the rich cheat, lie and steal, that is their modus operandi
Re:OpenAI was already a dubious idea (Score:5, Informative)
The only part that matters:
Ravine then appeared to have moved beyond domain squatting, filing for a trademark on the name “Open AI” (with a space) on the very evening Altman and Brockman made their announcement.
Waiting until a billionaire-backed organization is already using it is exactly the time when filing for a trademark won't work. It doesn't matter much who used it first in that case. You can't be very serious if you didn't even file a provisional trademark application before that point.
There are lots of obvious/generic names that get trademark protection...if they file. A retail store called "Best Buy" comes to mind. What a boring name that just describes what any retail store would try to say about themselves.
That said, suing over the domain name that was registered before the trademark is just not going to hold much weight. Especially if the domain wasn't being used commercially at the time. Owning a domain name doesn't cause trademark confusion unless you're offering substantially similar services on that domain where it might cause confusion. The settlement should involve just paying a big sum for the domain and dismissing the rest.
most feared 'O' (Score:2)
More feared than the Nazgul? (Score:1)
Ask SCO how afraid they were. Oh wait, you can't, because their heads are all on pikes now.
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Gradiente's IPHONE (Score:2)
Related? (Score:3)
Recently OpenAI became less of a non-profit and more of a for-profit entity:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/n... [pbs.org]
Would they even bother suing this guy had they remained a non-profit entity from top to bottom?
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https://insights.fluidbranding... [fluidbranding.com]
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True but that was a ridiculous suit that barely had any merit. I still can't understand why they even bothered.
capitalists always only ever lie (Score:1)
Re: capitalists always only ever lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, as Harry Truman remarked:
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan "Down With Socialism" on the banner of his "great crusade," that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is "Down with Progress--down with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal," and "down with Harry Truman's fair Deal." That's all he means.
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Yes, and there are many who "by [capitalism] mean 'the things they don't like.' Anything they do like fits squarely into a good [socialist] system."
It's become trendy to look at anything you don't like and say "oh that's because capitalism. If we didn't have capitalism that bad thing wouldn't have happened" despite plenty of evidence that many of the social problems we have are human problems that happen in any human political system.
I mean, do you really think that it's only in capitalist systems that yo
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The problem is the gatekeepers are people who capitalism has worked out particularly good for, so they are not willing to open the possibility of rolling the dice on a different system
It's not just the 1% who think that way. There are a billion people who are not willing to roll those dice, because they look at other (less capitalist) systems in the world and they look at history. They see the difference in overall standard of living, individual freedoms, corruption, etc. If we get to a point where the capitalist systems are doing much worse than the competition, you might see something happen. But don't expect that to necessarily be an upward trajectory in terms of human rights or
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Get out of here with your parroting of "iphone benuzeual 100 bajillion" nonsense. Everyone's heard it before, and your delivery makes you even worse at it than the near-entirety of the other disingenuous prats here. Come back from your at-will-fireable job, from your rented bedroom, when you have something approaching an original thought on capitalism. Til then, go back to paying your landlord with the money you made while making someone else even richer.
Trademark escalation (Score:1)
Connections (Score:2)