Altman doesn’t appear to be a beacon of corporate ethics.
There has to be a reason why almost every single important partnership OpenAI had, abruptly ended, except for maybe Nvidia.
Just recently Satya Nadella publicly implied that OpenAI should not be trusted.
They are slowly becoming the STD of the AI industry, it’s like they think they are too big and awesome to need friends.
Maybe pissing Apple off will teach them a lesson?
Do those exist? I'm usually happy to see a mild candle flicker in the ethics window.
In the early days all their products were explicitly designed to only work with each other to create a hardware walled garden.
Similar to the music world, the better you are, usually the more obscure you are as well. (e.g., Allan Holdsworth is a name known to most pros but the average Jack or Jill have no idea who he is or why he's considered important.)
All they seem to have gotten out of it is some creepy blogpost:
I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.
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.
Yeah it almost certainly won't be captured by them. That value is going to be captured by the folks/companies that shrink wrap the capabilities into a nice SaaS or other tool, that a business can buy off the shelf and give to their employees.
The model makers are on a fast track to just becoming dumb pipes, not unlike ISPs.
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.
from a non-US perspective yes, but so are the rest of the major providers
The moat is way smaller than with Office or Gsuite because they feed data into the chat interface and it gives them an answer. The moat for Gsuite and Office is higher because you have to move all your data and reorganize it. Oh and everyone has to learn how to use the new software clients.
This time, it is different with AI. The rate of change is significant.
From no internet to internet the change is pretty profound. But my job is already very automated for the most part. It's true AI might automate it a bit more, but it's not like I'm going from zero automation to full on automation. That's not nothing, and it is worth something, but it's also not internet from no internet level of change either.
This is essentially what Google has done, and it's a shame the US is so weak on enforcing antitrust laws.
China is obviously in the GPU/RAM race. Heard of Huawei, Moore Threads, Lisuan Tech, CXMT?
Unless someone comes up with a brilliant optimization strategy or new hardware that renders all that inefficient Nvidia crap overnight.
This is hilarious. The company run by sama? The company that started as the largest copyright violation ever? How can you be above reproach when you start with such disregard like that?
It's also possible to lose touch (e.g., butterfly keyboards).
There will be a market for the car, but Ferrari is a mix of a car company, a lifestyle brand, and a jewelery company. The Luce doesn't really fit the image they've cultivated and is not distinctive enough from the rest of the market. It's almost too pedestrian. The inside is nice, but you can't flex on others with a nice interior. It also doesn't have fun features that are proving to be desirable, like the faux shifting that the Hyundai has and that other brands are gonna start adopting. It feels like a car Ferrari made to say they made an EV. Its like they felt they had to, either due to internal or external pressures.
If I am understanding you correctly, it seems the Luce does not factor in to that equation. There are no requirements for anyone to buy a Luce in order to unlock the privilege of buying higher tier models.
“Hey, it’s your friendly Ferrari dealer. About your position on the list for an F80… we’re going to need you to buy a Luce to maintain your position and ensure you are eligible to purchase an F80 when we get an allocation.”
And that’s how you sell out a production run for a Ferrari that looks like a Kia. Force rich people to buy it to get the car they actually want, just like a Rolex AD does with Lady Datejusts if you want a Daytona allocation.
> they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them
If they hired Jony Ive to build a "platform" they will be very disappointed. He has no experience in doing that. They hired him to design a device, probably comment on the UI (if there is any, though I don't think he is qualified to direct either UI personally).
Aside from that, yeah, they royally screwed up here. Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them.
I've said it before on this topic: this goes _way_ past non-competes and the like. If you learn a novel method for doing something you are free (in my book) to recreate it at another company. You are not free to steal code/designs/etc verbatim and you are absolutely not ok to encourage people you are poaching (poaching is fine itself) to steal secrets/ideas on their way out. Also the whole "lying to a manufacturer to say Apple gave OpenAI permission to use the same proprietary technique" is really gross.
Is there any reason to think this is roque employees doing something? We know Altman is ethically challenged. It is equally or even more likely that management welcommed employees to doing this.
This could be a blessing in disguise for OpenAI. This mess was conducted under Altman’s watch—it could be an opportunity to Kalanick him.
The Board could elevate Altman to Chairman emeritus or something, choose a new CEO and settle with Apple. That will probably involve shutting down the hardware project and clawing back comp from its employees who helped make this mess.
Hell they might’ve been bought by OpenAI for billions instead of… HP lol
sama plays loose with the truth. so likely the employees are gonna follow their boss in cutting corners.
you see it everywhere in gvt/large organizations - if you come from a poor country - if the president is corrupt - the whole gvt gets corrupted.
That's why Apple used open-source software to build a kernel.
And why they used third party developers to develop the ecosystem of applications.
Isn't that the very definition of a platform?
Apparently, everyone is building the platform all the time, even when it’s just a user facing application
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, and wanting it bad enough is not enough to make one.
Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense. They are the only company with any successful experience.
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.
Also wasted spending is not quite the same as "not wanting to spend" -- it's more, to GP's point, "spending a lot unsuccessfully." I got the sense a lot of the friction Nokia and Windows Phone faced were due to Google (and to some extent Apple) using the market dominance of their properties (Android, YouTube, Search, Maps) to suppress competition.
I suppose it's fair play for what MSFT did in the OS and browser wars, but they got dinged pretty hard by Antitrust and played nice for a decade+ after that. Google is starting to see the antitrust blowback for it's actions only now, long after the competition has been crushed.
It makes a lot of sense to get into a massive legal battle with one of the most deep-pocketed companies on the planet?
Who is to say Apple employees (at Apple) haven’t been vibe coding or asking gpt for technical topics? Also, funny timing from Apple - there is a lot of PR and optics riding on this lawsuit.
Like, this is the same Apple that tried to tell a judge "a touch is a zero-length swipe" when suing the shit out of Android vendors, right? In their eyes, all the competition was supposed to stick with styluses and Windows Mobile 6.x.
People here are way too invested in hating Sam to be remotely rational on this topic.
I mean regardless of whether it’s a trade secret, you’re going to know how to do specific things that can’t be protected against copying.
There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy when it comes to anodizing.
Except there are. It’s why clean-room design [1] is a thing.
And unsurprisingly, that's not what the lawsuit is over!
Legally, no. Reasonably, for purposes of discussion, I think it has. The “LOL” dumbfuck who airlifted files into OpenAI isn’t particularly ambiguous [1].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-11/openai-en...
LOL Liu hasn’t—to my knowledge—been fired. When OpenAI was notified of his conduct, they didn’t confidentially settle. Instead, OpenAI’s legal went cold on Apple.
It’s not legally certain. But you really have to stretch the facts to make this seem ambiguous.
The rest of us are allowed to rightfully laugh at them.