Last update: Tuesday 1/16/24
1) The massive copyright violation lawsuit filed by the New York Times against OpenAi and Microsoft, and (2) OpenAI's strategy to convert ChatGPT into a revenue generating platform..
A.TL;DR ... Top 2 stories in past 2 weeks ...
Last year ended with a bang, tremors, and aftershocks; so it should come as no surprise that the new year has begun with further consequences of the raucous ending of the old.
1) New York Times lawsuit(s) against OpenAi and Microsoft
A few days after Christmas, the New York Times filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, lawsuits that alleged that their use of millions of articles published in the Times to train the GPT large language models without the Times' permission constituted a massive violation of the Times' copyrights. According to the Wall Street Journal:
- "The Times is seeking damages, in addition to asking the court to stop the tech companies from using its content and to destroy data sets that include the Times’ work ... In its suit, the Times said the fair-use argument shouldn’t apply because the AI tools can serve up, almost verbatim, large chunks of text from Times news articles."
Although other publishers have filed similar claims, the Associated Press and Axel Springer have already worked out payment arrangements with OpenAI. If the Times were to win its suit, OpenAi and Microsoft would have to make substantial payments, perhaps billions of dollars.
Given the high stakes involved, this case will take years before a final decision is rendered by the courts, probably by the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, these same high stakes might provide the Times with sufficient leverage to "persuade" OpenAi and Microsoft to reach a much lower, but mutually acceptable out-of-court settlement.
On the other hand, as per one of the related articles, as a result the immediate success of its $13 billion investment in OpenAI, Microsoft has now passed Apple to become the most valuable public company in the world. To be specific, Microsoft's market value has exceeded $3 trillion. As such, it could probably afford to make multi-billion dollar payments to the Times. But if the courts compelled Microsoft to make multi-billion dollar payments, Microsoft's Big Tech competitors would also be compelled to make similar payments ... which some of them might not be able to afford.
Another related link is a podcast featuring an interview in which an editor of The Verge interviewed Dana Rao, the general counsel for Adobe. Among other things, the counsel discusses Adobe's decision to negotiate fees to the owners of the visual materials Adobe used to train its AI image generator called "Firefly" before it trained the generator. The courts might consider Adobe's strategy as evidence that OpenAI and Microsoft might have been able to produce their own image and text generators by following a similar strategy of negotiating payments before they started training their models
Finally, our previous TL;DR and podcast -- Top AI stories of 2023 -- predicted that "the rapid and widespread proliferation of small language models (SLMs) will be the dominant AI news stories throughout 2024" because a growing body of research has shown that small models have surprising power. Had OpenAI and Microsoft anticipated this finding, they might have produced language modules as powerful as their GPT series using a fraction of the training materials. This would have entailed a fraction of the copyrights involved ... and more affordable court ordered payments to the NY Times and other data owners.
2) Conversion of ChatGPT into a revenue generating platform
Last summer, OpenAI announced its intention to open an app store for extension to ChatGPT. It affirmed this intention at its developer conference in December. And it made its official announcement on Wednesday January 10th. As per our headline story in the NY Times, OpenAI "was opening an app store for people to share customized versions of its popular chatbot, ChatGPT, as the artificial intelligence company works to expand the reach of its flagship technology and turn it into a moneymaker". In other words, OpenAI wants to turn ChatGPT into a platform.
In so doing, OpenAI hopes to follow the same path to greater financial success that has been followed by Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Google's Play Store, and Apple's App Store, the same path that Elon Musk wants Twitter to follow by his conversion of Twitter to "X".
If you develop a great app, it will attract many users; but if you convert your app into a platform, lots of other developers and other creators will use their ingenuity to create lots of new content for your platform, e.g., apps and extensions. This new content will attract far larger numbers of users and thereby generate far more income from new subscription fees and/or advertising fees ... fees from which you can extract a very substantial share.
Why is OpenAI launching its app store at this time? On the one hand, it cost OpenAI (and Microsoft) billions of dollars to develop and more billions to operate its GPT models. On the other hand, most ChatGPT users are still using the free GPT-3.5 model. So OpenAI needs more revenue. As a first step, OpenAI will only allow access to its app store to its "plus" users, i.e., users who pay the $20 per month subscription fee for access to GPT-4.
B. Top stories ...
- LLM News
"The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, touching off a legal fight over generative-AI technologies, with implications for the future of the news business", Alexandra Bruell, Wall Street Journal, 12/27/23 ***
-- This story also covered by The Verge, BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, NPR, Engadget, TechCrunch ... and NY Times
-- Here's a related story ➡ "Inside the News Industry’s Uneasy Negotiations With OpenAI", Benjamin Mullin, NY Times, 12/29/23
-- Here's another related story ➡ "Microsoft Tops Apple to Become Most Valuable Public Company", Tripp Mickle and Karen Weise, NY Times, 1/13/24
-- And a 3rd related story (podcast) ➡ "How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao", Nilay Patel, The Verge, 1/9/24 - OpenAI
"OpenAI Unveils App Store for Custom Chatbots", Cade Metz, NY Times, 1/8/24 ***
-- This story also covered by TechCrunch, Bloomberg, The Verge,
-- The following commentary focused on the app store as OpenAI's strategy for transforming ChatGPT into a lucrative platform, like Facebook, because ChatGPT is not earning enough revenue from subscriptions ➡ "ChatGPT’s FarmVille Moment", David Karpf, TheAtlantic, 1/12/24
This page contains links to responses by Google's Bard chatbot running Gemini Pro to 12 questions that should be asked more frequently, but aren't. As consequence, too many readily understood AI terms have become meaningless buzzwords in the media.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your comments will be greatly appreciated ... Or just click the "Like" button above the comments section if you enjoyed this blog note.