Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and the public face of ChatGPT, has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age, whose influence supposedly extends to the White House on the strength of his ideas alone.
Or at least that’s the image he’s managed to cultivate. A new exposé in the New Yorker paints a different portrait, and it’s substantially more vexing. Drawing on interviews with numerous OpenAI insiders who worked with Altman, the article portrays the CEO not as a technical wiz, but as a skilled manipulator— and one with a surprisingly shallow grasp of the AI systems his company is building.
According to numerous engineers interviewed for the article, Altman lacks experience in both programming and in machine learning — a shortage of expertise that becomes obvious when the CEO mixes up basic AI terms.
Apple has a trademark for ‘Apple’ in computers. Apples have existed before trademarks have.
Not to mention the Beatles music corporation, which was Apple too.
They can have their logo trademarked, but they can’t go after grannies for calling their desserts “apple pie.”
OpenAI literally goes after people for calling their generative pre-trained transformers “GPT.”
I did have that qualifier there for very good reason ;) Those grannies can make apple pie all day, but as soon as they try to sell a phone called Granny’s Apple Pie Phone they will get sued.
All that said, I don’t have skin in the game. I don’t particularly like ‘devils advocate’-ing for OpenAI or Apple here lol so I’ll stop. I’m not really in favor of IP law in general, but I imagine trademarks can protect open source ventures to prevent hijacking by a corporation, but that’s about the best use-case I can see for IP law
OpenAI has shareholders and a board of directors. Of course they will go after people. Shareholders and the directors want profit and they want it now. Little Mark’s GPT app is a threat to those directors’ dollars, unfortunately. Directors don’t care because they don’t have a soul, they gave OpenAI access to the best legal council money can buy. Sam Altman will utilize it to make those directors and the rest of the shareholders happy. He wants to keep his job because he’s an egomaniac who thinks running an AI company is godhood, when he’s actually just an employee of the wealthiest people alive and if keeps doing whatever they want him to do with no questions asked, he gets into the kid-diddling club with exclusive rights to rape children
Apple has a trademark in computing technologies because apples are not typically associated with computers. GPT, as a technical term related to the model and architecture, is pretty natural associated with ML products, so it really should never get a trademark grant for being merely descriptive.