What is the real face of the person who acquired the 'open.ai' domain before OpenAI and is fighting in court?
In August 2023, AI development company OpenAI sued a company called 'Open Artificial Intelligence Inc. (Open AI)' for trademark infringement. Unlike OpenAI, which became world famous for developing ChatGPT, the sued Open AI had a space between 'Open' and 'AI' and acquired the 'open.ai' domain before OpenAI. At first glance, it seems like an example of
Why OpenAI Is at War With a Guy Named Guy - Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-14/why-openai-is-at-war-with-a-guy-named-guy
After hearing that 'OpenAI had sued Open AI,' Latif checked some court documents. It turned out that Open AI's founder, Lavigne, had indeed acquired the 'open.ai' domain before OpenAI was launched by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman . A few months later, when OpenAI was launched, he trademarked 'Open AI' with a half-width space on the night of the announcement.
Lavigne also claimed to be working on the same ideas as Altman and Brockman, and to have invented the video-sharing technology made famous by Snapchat and TikTok, but he had little online presence. That led Latliff to suspect that Lavigne was either a weirdo or a conman, and OpenAI's lawyers seemed to think the same. In the end, a federal judge banned Lavigne from using the name 'Open AI' until the lawsuit was resolved.
However, in April 2024, Lavigne and his new lawyers filed a 100-page counterclaim against OpenAI, Altman and Brockman, alleging that in 2015, before OpenAI was founded, Lavigne had met with Silicon Valley luminaries to raise $100 million for an open-source general-purpose artificial intelligence project.
Among the notable people Lavigne is said to have met with are Google co-founder Larry Page , Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun , Google research director Peter Norvig , Stripe CEO Patrick Collison , and former Apple executive Tom Gruber , who co-created Siri.
Lavigne claims that the idea of 'open source general artificial intelligence' was not invented in parallel, and that Altman and Brockman stole his idea. The counterclaim also includes LeCun's statement that 'people should know more about this' and Gruber's statement that 'it is tragic that OpenAI's theft from Guy Lavigne may have historic consequences.'
'Honestly, it just seemed crazy to me. $100 million? A historic result? I thought maybe Lavigne had fabricated quotes to support his crazy claims,' said Latif. However, when I contacted Gruber, who is actually highly regarded in the AI industry, he confirmed that he was aware of Lavigne's lawsuit and had made the statements quoted in the counterclaim.
'He's been a serious AI guy from the beginning. I have email records from that time. There's no doubt he was pitching Open AI at least six months before Altman showed up,' Gruber said, adding that he also knew that Lavigne had approached Google's Page. Gruber said of Lavigne's personality, 'He's not as charismatic as Sam Altman, but he's smart and honest.'
When asked by Ratliff why he made the statement, Lavigne pointed out that it was OpenAI that sued him, not the other way around: 'That's not fair. That's all I'm saying.'
At this point, it became clear that Lavigne was not just a trademark troll as Latif and most others had thought, but a 'loser of justice' who had been defeated in Silicon Valley. Latif tried to contact Lavigne from various sources, and was able to interview him in person in May 2024.
Lavigne's home in
Raised in a small village in Israel, Lavine was given a PC at the age of five and immediately became engrossed in programming, where he first encountered AI at the University of Warwick in the UK. Using AI as a stepping stone, Lavine successfully built up the funds and connections to advance to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US. At MIT, he hosted a conference for technology entrepreneurs called MIT Playground, whose members included
After experiencing setbacks with several projects, Lavigne saw a presentation by students from MIT's Neural Networks Lab in 2009 and learned that advanced 'deep learning' systems could help with image recognition. Anticipating the emergence of general artificial intelligence through deep learning, Lavigne came up with Wikineering , an open collaboration platform for engineering. Lavigne contacted Erik Brynjolfsson , who was then director of MIT's Digital Economy Initiative, and Brynjolfsson became an enthusiastic supporter of Wikineering.
Over the next few years, Google established a monopoly on the deep learning market and acquired DeepMind in 2014, which made Lavigne concerned about the concentration of power in one company. He first considered starting his own AI company, but he didn't have the advanced skills to work with neural networks, and it was difficult with talented engineers being paid handsomely by Google.
So Lavigne proposed to incorporate the principles of Wikeneering into AI development and to gather researchers with the philosophy of 'building AI openly for the benefit of humanity, not for profit.' He came up with the idea of establishing 'Open AI,' an organization to compete with Google. This argument is almost identical to the discussion when Altman and others founded OpenAI, but Lavigne actually acquired the 'open.ai' domain before Altman and others, and sold the idea to Page and Gruber at the TED conference in March 2015.
'Apple had a hard time attracting top AI researchers because it didn't allow its own researchers to speak openly,' Gruber said in a statement about the lawsuit. 'So Guy's proposal for Open AI as a way to attract researchers, accelerate progress, and share their work with humanity was a powerful idea, and one that I personally supported.'
Lavigne approached many celebrities after that and launched the first website under the 'open.ai' domain in September 2015, but the $100 million he estimated he needed to make Open AI work was hard to raise. Meanwhile, on December 11, Altman and Brockman announced the launch of OpenAI and that it had already received $1 billion in funding (about 120 billion yen at the time).
Lavigne was surprised, but he decided to accept it because his idea was to open up AI development, not to pursue profit or ego. However, he also admitted that he had a voice in his head saying, 'They stole the idea, the concept, and even the name.'
'At this point, you might think that Guy Lavigne had a similar idea for OpenAI, and he pitched it to the same people. But OpenAI launched, and Open AI didn't launch. Game over. The unwritten rule in the startup world is that the winner is the one who creates it,' Latif said.
After the launch of OpenAI was announced, Lavigne, who had registered the trademark 'Open AI,' sent an email to Altman and Ilya Satskivar, two of the three co-founders of OpenAI. In the email, he wrote, 'We are working on an initiative called Open.AI to build a platform for researchers around the world to collectively engineer deep learning algorithms. This initiative has the same goal as yours, which is to accelerate the advent of general artificial intelligence through open collaboration,' suggesting that a collaboration might be possible.
The following week, Lavigne and Brockman met, but Brockman quickly rejected the offer to collaborate. Although Brockman emphasized that OpenAI would work for the benefit of humanity, to Lavigne, he looked like someone who had launched a hot for-profit startup. 'I was surprised at his lack of empathy. I forget what he said, but he said something like, 'I'm not interested in selling,' and he walked out,' Lavigne recalled.
Then, in January 2022, when OpenAI began its path to becoming a commercial company and filed for a trademark, Altman sent Lavigne his first email since 2015, asking if he would be willing to hand over the 'open.ai' domain and intellectual property rights. In his reply, Lavigne pointed out that 'Elon Musk paid $11 million (about 1.64 billion yen) to acquire the Tesla website and trademark,' but ultimately offered to donate the transfer fee to a non-profit academic AI research initiative. However, it seems that the communication with Altman stopped midway.
In September 2022, OpenAI released the image generation AI '
More than half a year later, in August 2023, Lavigne received an email informing him that OpenAI had sued Open AI in federal district court over the domain and trademark. 'I thought, 'What is this?!' Altman could have gotten the domain and trademark for free, or at least for a donation. Instead, he decided to donate millions of dollars to the world's most feared law firm to sue me,' Lavigne said.
OpenAI's claim is that Lavigne's Open AI is a latecomer and has misled many users into thinking that 'Open AI has some kind of relationship with OpenAI.' The crux of the lawsuit is, 'Who first established the name 'OpenAI' in the market?' Since there is no clear evidence that Lavigne was active under the 'open.ai' domain and the name 'Open AI,' Lavigne may be at a disadvantage in this regard.
In addition, those who met with Lavigne in 2015 have remained silent, with the exception of Gruber, and many of the people involved have not responded to Latliff's inquiries. However, when Norvig responded to Latliff's inquiries, saying, 'I'm sorry, I don't remember having that conversation,' he said. After learning that Lavigne had been shown emails he exchanged with Lavigne, he responded, 'I remember meeting someone about this topic. I think it was Guy Lavigne. I remember telling him to focus on what he wanted to achieve and let go of the domain and copyright of OpenAI.'
'After all, this all happened 10 years ago, and even if they remembered how Lavigne did things, it's unlikely they'd gain any advantage by participating in a lawsuit involving a tech giant backed by the most feared law firm on the planet,' Ratliff said.
In an interview with Ratliff, Lavigne said that he had invented or designed various ideas, such as 'algorithms for scaling social media,' 'Airbnb-like social networks for renting out spare rooms,' and 'single-seat electric cars,' but that other companies had successfully implemented similar ideas. Lavigne doesn't believe that all of these ideas were stolen, but rather that they were too early or failed to raise funds, which led to their failure.
Lavigne has made some profit from his Bitcoin investments, and has also had some success with his startup Video.io , a service that allows businesses to create their own TikTok-like apps, so he says he has enough assets to live a comfortable life.
Lavigne may not be an unfortunate genius with innovative technology, but rather a loser who dreams of ideas without the ability to develop them, Latif said, but in a way he represents people who don't care about small business or unfinished products and are faced with an industry that tells them to 'make it or die.'
In addition, Mr. Lavigne talks about the founding philosophy of Open AI and criticism of Open AI on his website.
The Counterclaim | Guy Ravine
https://guyravine.com/counterclaim
Related Posts:
in Note, Posted by log1h_ik