OpenAI’s Secret Weapon Is Sam Altman’s 33-Year-Old Lieutenant

The tension caused by OpenAI’s practice of ingesting material on the internet to build the large language model powering ChatGPT was already evident. It alleging that GitHub Copilot, which uses OpenAI’s tech to write computer code, violated copyright by using existing code repositories as training data, a claim that OpenAI disputed. Visual artists were such as Midjourney and Stability AI Ltd. for copyright infringement, which the companies also contested. It wasn’t hard to foresee similar legal action coming from media companies, whose businesses had already been disrupted by the internet, and which were concerned that AI chatbots built in part on their own content could siphon away readership without compensation.