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🏠 AI's Kryptonite

🏠 AI's Kryptonite

Copyright is no joke

Stephen Flanders
January 03, 2024

Gm. Happy New Year, and welcome back! Damn does it feel good to be writing for you all again. Let’s make this year the best one yet.

— Stephen Flanders

🏠 AI

OpenAI’s Copyright Problem

2023 was, in many ways, a banner year for OpenAI and AI more generally.

ChatGPT took off. GPT-4, Llama, Claude, Bard, and a million other models and chatbots were released. And AI entrepreneurs like Sam Altman are now some of the most important people in tech.

2024, although still looking promising, could be a bitttt more difficult because of a wave of copyright lawsuits.

OpenAI was already dealing with suits from authors like George RR Martin and comedian Sarah Silverman, they now have to deal with a case from the New York Times.

Specifically, the NYT claims that OpenAI and Microsoft built a direct competitor by copying millions of the Times’s articles. And unlike the other suits, this one seems particularly strong:

They have registered all of their work with the US Copyright Office.
They have a bunch of examples of ChatGPT reciting Times excerpts verbatim.
Because of these factors, they have the benefit of OpenAI needing to prove that training ChatGPT on the Times’ work constitutes as fair use. That is going to be an uphill battle.

So, what happens if the NYT wins? Well first, OpenAI would be on the hook for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. But, perhaps even more damagingly, it could force OpenAI to delete the Times’ material from their datasets. And, most damagingly, it would probably open the floodgates to a flood of similar suits.

This is a story we’re going to be watching closely.

It Might Be Time… for OpenAI to prioritize signing more deals like the one they did with Axel Springer.

🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

Headlines are back on X.
Say what you want about the CEO of Masimo, but the man is hardcore.
China’s BYD is now selling more EVs than Tesla.
SpaceX is in for a big year.

AI

Microsoft’s Copilot app is coming to iOS.
OpenAI’s annualized revenue is now up to $1.6B.
Apple might not be behind the AI 8 ball for much longer.
AI alignment might be difficult.

SCIENCE

We are about to enter the golden age of gene therapy.
Let’s kill cancer with jackhammers.
And let’s kill obesity with a vibrating pill.
Here’s the blood boy himself Bryan Johnson’s full health protocol.

CRYPTO

Make Ethereum cypherpunk again.
There’s a whole lot of narratives to watch this year
The book-length Messari theses is here.
The ETF just keeps looking more likely.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Unnatural Products, a Santa Cruz, CA-based biotech company pairing AI with chemistry for molecularly targeted therapeutics, raised $32M in Series A funding.

Stat: 71.5%: How much Fidelity has marked down their share of X.

Rabbit hole: Evolution As Backstop For Reinforcement Learning (Gwern.net)