Why OpenAI Is at War With an Obscure Idea Man

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."

OpenAI was already a dubious idea

[i kan reed]

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[hey!]

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.

Re:

[GoRK]

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

Re:

[smooth wombat]

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.

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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[r1348]

Joke's on you, I just trademarked blowjob.AI

Re:

[phantomfive]

He trademarked the idea first, and the article contains evidence that he was going around trying to raise money. It also said he offered to give the domain to openAI if they made a donation to charity.

So we, as a society, shouldn't let big corporations steal from people just because they have money.

Re:

[JaredOfEuropa]

Trademarks do need to be defended, and OpenAI (the foundation) has been active and in the public spotlight for quite a while now. If he did nothing to defend that trademark, isn't his case rather weak?

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[guruevi]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[omnichad]

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'

[phantomfive]

They were called "most feared" by market research firm BTI [linkedin.com]. Looking through their cases they seem like a rather boring large law firm.

More feared than the Nazgul?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask SCO how afraid they were. Oh wait, you can't, because their heads are all on pikes now.

Re:

[phantomfive]

Oh yeah, that reminds me to do my semi-decadal checkup on Darl. Seems he didn't make it past the covid era [wikipedia.org], and also filed for bankruptcy along the way.

Gradiente's IPHONE

[Flavianoep]

It makes me remember Gradiente's iphone. Gradiente, a Brazilian company, registered the brand iphone years prior to Apple's launch of the iPhone. I don't think that the similarity goes beyond that, as Gradiente's iphone was just a name until after iPhone had been already released. According to Brazil's Supreme Court Rules Over IPhone's Trade Mark [europa.eu], both companies can use the iphone brand, with the restriction that Gradiente's iphone cannot be just called "iPhone".

Related?

[DrMrLordX]

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?

Re:

[timeOday]

Interesting / humorous precedent of a nonprofit suing a for-profit for trademark infringement: the WWF (World Wildlife Foundation) vs the WWF (World Wrestling Federation). Wrestling, as in, Hulk Hogan type wrestling. The outcome was, the Wildlife nonprofit won, and pro wrestling had to rename itself to World Wrestling Entertainment.

https://insights.fluidbranding... [fluidbranding.com]

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

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

[invisiblefireball]

That's the way it always goes, they'd rather spend a hundred, even a thousand times the money as long as they don't give anything to you, because fuck you. that's the psychology of capitalism, and the reason the world is being destroyed. Everyone only ever lies, as viciously as possible, because they're legally required to by the stock market, which would punish them for telling the truth. cf plastics recycling for a recent example.

Re: capitalists always only ever lie

[smooth wombat]

And by socialism you mean things such as highways, river navigation, FEMA (why aren't all those anti-socialists down South not picking themselves up by their bootstraps rather than waiting for a government handout?), fire fighting, and all those other things which make life bearable.

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.

Re:

[fluffernutter]

By socialism they always mean "the things they don't like". Anything they do like fits squarely into a good capitalist system.

Re:

[pulpo88]

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

Re:

[fluffernutter]

That's why people should just take the good from either and the bad from either and just figure out a new system that works now in our time, considering the things we need to accomplish as a species such as keeping the planet a habitable place. 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 that may not consider making and feeding people a billion hamburgers per minute t

Trademark escalation

[wetmice]

I have today trademarked the tagline "Most Feared Law Firm in the World." Will keep y'all posted. /s

Connections

[fluffernutter]

I was just having the conversation with people on /. about how people who are wealthy tend to stay wealthy. Except the only thing that is more important than wealth is having the right connections. Here it is in action.