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Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

ft.com

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Re: Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

#181

Post by BowBun »

joelthelion wrote: post #172
ricardobayes wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race. I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.

> The real value is and going to be in hardware Unless someone comes up with a brilliant optimization strategy or new hardware that renders all that inefficient Nvidia crap overnight.

I'm privy to dozens of people working on this problem every day and I imagine there's many more people working on this problem out of sight. I'm bullish on this idea, but it's going to be a slow burn.

Re: Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

#182

Post by nxobject »

LatencyKills wrote: post #98
deepwoods wrote: post #8

FT frames this as some aggressive escalation tactic, but document retention letters are extremely standard practice. At this point they're basically a formality, as any former Apple employee at OpenAI really ought to know by now that they could get dragged into this. Hold letters can be aggressive if you send them before you've even filed a complaint, but if anything, Apple is late to the party with these.

Something similar happened to me when I left Microsoft for Apple (I moved from the Visual Studio team to the Xcode team). MS spent six months trying to prove I'd taken "industry secrets" with me. I hadn't. The entire thing felt like a personal attack and was extremely stressful. It sounds like, in this case, Apple has hard proof that documents were stolen.

> It sounds like, in this case, Apple has hard proof that documents were stolen.

Honestly, the proof is the least surprising part -- Apple's been paranoid about leaks for decades, even when the stakes have been lower.

Re: Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

#183

Post by dofm »

Zigurd wrote: post #100

Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. That includes things like Windows Phone, Fire Phone, all the glasses, Humane, etc. As much as everybody hates on OpenAI for chaotic management, they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them. Even though it probably only buys them a 20% chance of success, they haven't doomed the…

I don't think Jony Ive has this skillset either. They might make a very nice device (I'd expect it to be polarising).

Re: Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

#184

Post by Danox »

small_model wrote: post #156

So the ex-employee has to pay up or something, whats this got to do with OpenAI the company, seems like desperate attempt to slow down the company that will likely take Apple market share for dropping the ball on AI, they should look inwards rather than lashing out litigiously.

OpenAI the company really is as scummy as they come and that is probably why Apple gave them nothing unlike Microsoft, the Chinese model makers are currently proving that ultimately there is no moat around AI. Every day the cost of entry, software and hardware wise keeps getting smaller.

Note: The only thing Google got out of Apple was a one billion dollar refund on an existing search engine agreement, AI real value in the future is as a new addition, to the existing programming stack or toolkit used by programmers. That value does not add up to spending $1 trillion dollars on capex.

If Apple spends any big money in the next 2 to 4 years, they had better spend it on bringing the design and engineering of memory in-house to the Apple Silicon Group and TSMC.

Re: Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

#185

Post by StableAlkyne »

Zigurd wrote: post #142
delusional wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. Ahistoric jibber jabber. Microsoft gave it their very best shot with Windows Phone. Facebook renamed the entire company to make VR happen. These companies have shoved everything they got into making these platforms, and their fate would not have been different if they had been given another billion. Platforms are hard to make, an…

Fair enough, but I'd point out that, unlike Second Life, Meta didn't buy pants. If you want a chronicle of wasted spending regarding Microsoft and mobile devices, Google "Tomi Ahonen."

> Meta didn't buy pants

They also succeeded in the monumental task of making VR look boring.

VR platforms are an escapist's dream: you can be anything you want doing whatever you want. And how did they show off their fantasy world machine? They did office meetings in avatars of their real life selves.

Just spend one night in VRChat and everything Meta did will look like Plato's cave shadows.

Re: Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

#186

Post by mathisfun123 »

nxobject wrote: post #179
ricardobayes wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race. I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.

> AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.

I think you don't understand moat - that's not a moat.

Re: Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

#187

Post by glaslong »

ricardobayes wrote: post #162
Zigurd wrote: post #100

Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. That includes things like Windows Phone, Fire Phone, all the glasses, Humane, etc. As much as everybody hates on OpenAI for chaotic management, they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them. Even though it probably only buys them a 20% chance of success, they haven't doomed the…

AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race. I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.

Yup. Model capabilities seem to keep converging quickly, not leaders breaking away for long.

Frontier labs are racing towards SaaS commoditization at incredible speed. And while there might possibly be $Trillions in productivity gained from their use, there's no reason to think those gains get captured by the model makers or inference providers at this point.

Maybe the Claude or ChatGPT desktop apps will dominate as the new MS Excel, but that's hard to do without already having locked the whole market into Windows.

There's virtually no platform play available to them.

Re: Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

#188

Post by bg24 »

nxobject wrote: post #179
ricardobayes wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race. I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.

> AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.

There is a time window when it will flip. When Internet came along, we had a number of businesses that did not survive over the next years.

This time, it is different with AI. The rate of change is significant.

Re: Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters

#190

Post by an0malous »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #94
rancar2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh the irony if Apple can get a larger OpenAI stake than Microsoft.

I don’t think Cupertino will settle for stock. I think they’ll demand cash and an agreement that OpenAI abandon or reboot their hardware project. In the meantime, Apple gets an open kimono into everything OpenAI has planned. This could actually be the fuckup that kills OpenAI as an independent company. The threat of a cash judgement gums up not only an IPO, but also debt-based fundraising. (We equity guys are idiots,…

> This could actually be the fuckup that kills OpenAI as an independent company.

I wonder if they’ll be the Lehman Brothers of this bubble

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