NEW YORK, NEW YORK – DECEMBER 04: Sam Altman speaks onstage during The New York Times Dealbook Summit 2024 at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 04, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Eugene Gologursky\/Getty Images for The New York Times) | Image Credits:Eugene Gologursky \/ Getty Images for the New York Times <\/p>\n
From the moment OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stepped onstage, it was clear this was not going to be a normal interview.<\/p>\n
Altman and his chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, stood awkwardly toward the back of the stage at a jam-packed San Francisco venue that typically hosts jazz concerts. Hundreds of people filled steep theatre-style seating on Tuesday night to watch Kevin Roose, a columnist with The New York Times, and Platformer\u2019s Casey Newton record a live episode of their popular technology podcast, Hard Fork.<\/p>\n
Altman and Lightcap were the main event, but they\u2019d walked out too early. Roose explained that he and Newton were planning to \u2014 ideally, before OpenAI\u2019s executives were supposed to come out \u2014 list off several headlines that had been written about OpenAI in the weeks leading up to the event.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is more fun that we\u2019re out here for this,\u201d said Altman. Seconds later, the OpenAI CEO asked, \u201cAre you going to talk about where you sue us because you don\u2019t like user privacy?\u201d<\/p>\n
Within minutes of the program starting, Altman hijacked the conversation to talk about The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and its largest investor, Microsoft, in which the publisher alleges that Altman\u2019s company improperly used its articles to train large language models<\/a>. Altman was particularly peeved about a recent development in the lawsuit, in which lawyers representing The New York Times asked OpenAI to retain consumer ChatGPT and API customer data<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe New York Times, one of the great institutions, truly, for a long time, is taking a position that we should have to preserve our users\u2019 logs even if they\u2019re chatting in private mode, even if they\u2019ve asked us to delete them,\u201d said Altman. \u201cStill love The New York Times, but that one we feel strongly about.\u201d<\/p>\n For a few minutes, OpenAI\u2019s CEO pressed the podcasters to share their personal opinions about the New York Times lawsuit \u2014 they demurred, noting that as journalists whose work appears in The New York Times, they are not involved in the lawsuit.<\/p>\n Altman and Lightcap\u2019s brash entrance lasted only a few minutes, and the rest of the interview proceeded, seemingly, as planned. However, the flare-up felt indicative of the inflection point Silicon Valley seems to be approaching in its relationship with the media industry.<\/p>\n In the last several years, multiple publishers have brought lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta for training their AI models on copyrighted works. At a high level, these lawsuits argue that AI models have the potential to devalue, and even replace, the copyrighted works produced by media institutions.<\/p>\n Story Continues <\/p>\n But the tides may be turning in favor of the tech companies. Earlier this week, OpenAI competitor Anthropic received a major win in its legal battle against publishers<\/a>. A federal judge ruled that Anthropic\u2019s use of books to train its AI models was legal in some circumstances, which could have broad implications for other publishers\u2019 lawsuits against OpenAI, Google, and Meta.<\/p>\n Perhaps Altman and Lightcap felt emboldened by the industry win heading into their live interview with The New York Times journalists. But these days, OpenAI is fending off threats from every direction, and that became clear throughout the night.<\/p>\n Mark Zuckerberg has recently been trying to recruit OpenAI\u2019s top talent by offering them $100 million compensation packages<\/a> to join Meta\u2019s AI superintelligence lab, Altman revealed weeks ago on his brother\u2019s podcast.<\/p>\n When asked whether the Meta CEO really believes in superintelligent AI systems, or if it\u2019s just a recruiting strategy, Lightcap quipped: \u201cI think [Zuckerberg] believes he is superintelligent.\u201d<\/p>\n Later, Roose asked Altman about OpenAI\u2019s relationship with Microsoft, which has reportedly been pushed to a boiling point in recent months as the partners negotiate a new contract<\/a>. While Microsoft was once a major accelerant to OpenAI, the two are now competing in enterprise software and other domains.<\/p>\n \u201cIn any deep partnership, there are points of tension and we certainly have those,\u201d said Altman. \u201cWe\u2019re both ambitious companies, so we do find some flashpoints, but I would expect that it is something that we find deep value in for both sides for a very long time to come.\u201d<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s leadership today seems to spend a lot of time swatting down competitors and lawsuits. That may get in the way of OpenAI\u2019s ability to solve broader issues around AI, such as how to safely deploy highly intelligent AI systems at scale.<\/p>\n