That is absurd.
Copyright law is designed to strike a balance between two issues. One the one hand, the creator’s personality that’s baked into the specific form of expression. And on the other hand, society’s interest in ideas being circulated, improved and combined for the common good.
OpenAI built on the shoulders of almost every person that wrote text on a website, authored a book, or shared a video online. Now others build on the shoulders of OpenAI. How should the former be legal but not the latter?
Can’t have it both ways, Sam.
(IAAL, for what it’s worth.)
OpenAI's future investments -- billions -- were just threatened to be undercut by several orders of magnitude by a competitor. It's in their best interests to cast doubt on that competitor's achievements. If they can do so by implying that OpenAI are in fact the source of most of the DeepSeek's performance then all the better.
It doesn't matter whether there's a compelling legal argument around copyright, or even if it's true that they actually copied. It just needs to be plausible enough that OpenAI can make a reasonable case for continuing investment at the levels it's historically attained.
And plausibility is something they've handily achieved with this announcement -- the sentiment on HN at least is that it is indeed plausible that DeepSeek trained on OpenAI. Which means there's now doubt that a DeepSeek-level model could be trained without making use of OpenAI's substantial levels of investment. Which is the only thing that OpenAI should be caring about.
it is, but the 2nd order logic says that if they are trying to cast doubt, it means they've got nothing better to offer and casting doubt is the only step they have.
if i was an investor in openAI, this should be very scary as it simply means I've overvalued it.
this implies that when casting doubt the doubt is always false, if the doubt here is true, then it is a good offer.
I don't think that this is a working argument, because all their steps I can imagine are not mutually exclusive.
Sure, Open AI invested billions banking on the livelihood of every day people being replaced, or as Sam says, “A renegotiation of the social contract”
so as an engineer that is being targeted by meta and sales force under the “not hiring engineers plan” all o have to say to Open AI is “welcome to the social contract renegotiation table”
Indeed, when the alleged infringer is outside US jurisdiction and not violating any local laws in the country where it's domiciled.
The fact that Microsoft cannot even get this app removed from "app stores" tells us all we need to know.
It will be OpenAI and others who will be copying DeepSeek.
Some of us would _love_ to see Microsoft try to assert copyright over a LLM. The question might not be decided in their favour, putting a spectre over all their investment. It is not a risk worth taking.
Anyone remember this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Zamos
>there's now doubt that a DeepSeek-level model could be trained without making use of OpenAI's substantial levels of investment.
But, this still seems to be a problem for OpenAI. Who wants to invest "substantially" in a company whose output can be used by competitors to build an equal or better offering for orders of magnitude less?
Seems they'd need to make that copyright stick. But, that's a very tall and ironic order, given how OpenAI obtained its data in the first place.
There's a scenario where this development is catastrophic for OpenAI's business model.
Is there a scenario where it isn’t?
Either (1) a competitor is able to do it better without their work or (2) a competitor is able to use their output and develop a better product.
Either way, given the costs, how do you justify investing in OpenAI if the competitor is going to eat their lunch and you’ll never get a return on your investment?
Basically, in a round about way, OpenAi is going back to their roots and more - they're something between a charity and Robin Hood, stealing the money of rich investors and giving it to poor and aspirational AI competitors.
"Karma's a bitch, ain't it."
OpenAi spent investor money to enable random Chinese Ai startups to offer a better version of their own product at a fraction of the cost. In some ways, this was inevitable to be the conclusion, but I do find the way we arrive at this conclusion to be particularly enjoyable to watch playout.
Is it our job as a thinking public to decry it? Also sure. In fact, wildly yes.
Sam should focus on the product instead of trying to out-jerk Elon and his buddies.
OpenAI has a legally submitted point of view that they believe the benefits of AI to humanity are so great that anyone creating AI should be allowed to trample all over copyright laws, Terms of Use, EULAs, etc.
But OpenAI’s version of benefit to humanity is that they should be allowed to trample over those laws so they can benefit humanity by closely guarding the output of trampling those laws and charging humanity an access fee.
Even if we accept all of OpenAI’s criticisms of DeepSeek, they’re arguing that DeepSeek doing the exact same thing, but releasing the output for free for anyone to use is somehow less beneficial to humanity.
However, OpenAI and Google are far more politically influential than the lobbyists in the 90s, so it is likely to succeed.
My understanding is that legal positions and arguments (within Common Law) need not be consistent across "cases" - they are considered in isolation with regards the body of law extant at the time.
I think that Sam can quite happily argue two differing points of view to two courts. Until a judgement is made, those arguments are simply arguments and not "binding" or even "influential elsewhere" or whatever the correct terms are.
I think he can legitimately argue both ways but may not have it both ways.
It would be very sensible that if a trial comes up, all these arguments that Sam Altman made for the other side score against him and OpenAI.
What people “suck out” of their API are the general ideas. And they do it specifically so they can reassemble them in their own way.
It’s like reading all the Jack Reacher novels and then creating your own hero living through similar situations, but with a different name.
You’ll read it and you’ll say, dang, that situation/metaphor/expression/character reminds me of that Reacher novel. But there’s nothing Lee Child can do about it.
And that’s perfectly fine. Because he himself took many of his ideas from others, like Le Carré.
It’s the Eternal Tao.
