OpenAI is getting sued for being biased with Y Combinator | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI is getting sued for being biased with Y Combinator

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144 pointsudev409635 comments

Headline is misleading and the tweets are delusional. The whole ycombinator topic he rants about has nothing to do with the lawsuit he filled.

>> So as a member of the group ‘all of humanity,’ the reported beneficiaries of OpenAI, I have filed a claim for Breach of Fiduciary Duties. Breach of Fiduciary Duties is the umbrella my complaints generally fall under. The board members of OpenAI have a legal duty to serve the mission of the non-profit in good faith, to act prudently, and to obey the law, all of which they are not doing. OpenAI has constantly confirmed via public messaging their mission is to “benefit all of humanity;” the only logical conclusion to these statements is that all of humanity, you, me, and people on every continent, are beneficiaries of OpenAI’s mission. I firmly believe, and state in good faith, that every human being on the planet has standing to sue OpenAI for these egregious actions. Further, I look forward to hearing the legal team of OpenAI explain how this is not the case. If anyone has any illusions about the altruistic intentions of OpenAI, their explanation should put these illusions to bed.

This is going to get bounced out of court so fast. Most of this is pretty conspiratorial, and even if taken at face value, most of this is not grounds for a lawsuit, or if it is, it's not clear why he'd have standing to sue.

I'd love to read the court filings.

For “Breach of Fiduciary Duties” because:

> OpenAI has constantly confirmed via public messaging their mission is to “benefit all of humanity;” the only logical conclusion to these statements is that all of humanity, you, me, and people on every continent, are beneficiaries of OpenAI’s mission. I firmly believe, and state in good faith, that every human being on the planet has standing to sue OpenAI for these egregious actions.

LOL

Same legal energy as:

> I do not give Instagram or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future. With this statement, I give notice to Instagram it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. The violation of privacy can be punished by law (UCC 1-308- 1 1 308-103 and the Rome Statute). NOTE: Instagram is now a public entity. All members must post a note like this. If you prefer, you can copy and paste this version. If you do not publish a statement at least once it will be tacitly allowing the use of your photos, as well as the information contained in the profile status updates. DO NOT SHARE. Copy and paste.

This thing reads like 'Sovreign Citizen' level legal nonsense. Has he complained about fringe on flags yet?

That’s an admiralty flag. Why even acknowledge it?

I see what you did there. :-)

Yeah exactly. If they think that openAI stating that as their mission creates a fiduciary duty, well they are simply wrong.

I honestly wish courts were allowed to save everyone time and money by responding to these total nut jobs with the same three letter response you did. Some things are so blatantly stupid on their face they don't really deserve additional explication.

OK, after I managed to get through the tweet, my only conclusion is that this guy is some sort of conspiratorial nut job.

I think this not because of the pros/cons of his actual argument. I think this because his tweet is so rambling I can't really even figure out what his argument is.

First, he never gives a clear summary of what his actual suit is about. For example, I am actually very interested in how OpenAI could start as a non-profit and then somehow "pivot" to be a for-profit enterprise - I just don't understand the details of this. But this tweet just bloviates about how all these boards and people are connected (wholly unsurprising) without making any clear argument about what actual laws have been broken - just some random appeals to "breach of fiduciary duty".

I half expected the post to end with a wide eyed picture of him saying "Illuminati!!!".

BTW, why didn't he just start with a link to the actual lawsuit! I always think it's weird when people post tweets expecting you to have full context on something they themselves just did.

The Case: https://webapps.sftc.org/ci/CaseInfo.dll?CaseNum=CGC23606176

"Your session has expired. Please refresh the previous page and click on the document you want to retrieve."

Updated link. From the several updates is the one starting with: "FRAUD, COMPLAINT (TRANSACTION ID # 69904676)"

Never in my life have I seen a ".dll" webpage.

Other links on the site seem to have ".aspx" so I'm assuming it's some sort of .NET thing, does anyone know what a ".dll" page is?

Not sure this is the technology at play here, but ATL Server, a C++ based Microsoft web technology discontinued in 2008 basically supported two files extensions - .srf and .dll. See e.g. https://github.com/redpower1998/ATLServer/blob/bf3fd601bf281... .

I've only seen it once, and it was deutsche bahn..

IIS (Microsoft / Windows Server HTTP server) supports a technology rival to CGI called ISAPI, which was deployed using .dll files. .dll is a Microsofts' dynamic library standard, commonly produced by e.g. C/C++, but also by .Net.

The thing that stands out the most if the fact that most older IIS setups did not use rewrite on URLs, so instead of pointing to a nice looking path, they were pointing to .aspx files or .dll.

Gotta love the US legal system. When in doubt ...sue. gotta be grounds in there somewhere to claim this is harming me.

I'm no lawyer, so far be it for me to pass legal judgement. I'm sure those more qualified will do that.

But as a simple human I'm not sure I follow the argument. He doesn't feel the non-profit is benefitting all of humanity? Um, OK i guess. Hopefully they'll try harder??

Bummed out 'cause he hasn't got his API access yet? Sure, go ahead and sue. Like I say, gotta love the system...

You don't follow the argument because it isn't grounded in logic, it's an attempted rationalization of an emotional response. The attempt should perhaps be viewed with pity, more than anything else.

I think the root of the problem (lack of access to OpenAI for some people, or a lot of people if you are talking about multimodal or 32k context) is that the open models aren't quite competitive yet. So we are relying on this one company with superior models.

I hope that efforts like OpenLLaMA can be successful.

Ultimately what will really democratize this is new hardware paradigms that are variations on compute-in-memory and vastly more efficient.

People that showed up a little bit later might be kind of screwed now though with a long wait-list. Not sure.

From my perspective OpenAI has done a reasonable job at distributing access to a limited resource. But they definitely do hold some things back like the 32k and multimodal for privileged companies. That part doesn't seem particularly fair but also it seems that there just isn't capacity to do otherwise.

I think the whole landscape opens up dramatically within a couple of years with much more efficient hardware for GPT and much better open models.

The lawsuit is just for press, they know it is a joke.

Companies are allowed to have biases

>> Devs, while you are waiting for access right now, over 70 YC companies from the latest W23 batch are ‘AI companies.’

Disagree, got API access relatively early after announcement, have nothing to do with YC. But my suspicion is that some of YC batch got OpenAI API credits to use those, otherwise e.g. phind.com would go out of funding while ago.

- fraudulent “commingling” is above board with just a little paperwork

- OpenAI is for-profit but this guy’s crusade is based on it still being non-profit with a misunderstanding of fiduciary duty to its beneficiaries

fascinating, is this an example of America’s mental health crisis?

Is there an nft or a paid online legal workshop associated with this claim?

I know this isn't right or just but I can't help but automatically discount tweets from a blue checkmark. That switch from verified users to paid users has me on guard when I see it. Again, it's not right but that's the effect on me of people paying for verification.

But the switch was irrelevant if you knew how verification worked.

I just see it as a little skin in the game. Many communities have so many fly by night accounts that a tiny payment and link to a non-VOIP phone number is meaningful, as a standard user

I can already sense that this is going to get flagged very quickly. But so far this is yet another pyramid scheme pumping the VC grift now with added AI snake oil. The text that is interesting is this:

> Devs, while you are waiting for access right now, over 70 YC companies from the latest W23 batch are ‘AI companies.’ These companies will get access to OpenAI’s GPT and API while you are still waiting. The game is rigged;

That's right folks. You were all sitting on a 'waitlist' still 'waiting' for godot (O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com) to give you access and the YC mafia got immediate access ahead of you months ago.

Even when open source AI continues to catch up with hosted-only models; O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com attempts to use the might of regulatory capture to wipe open-source models and place in 'regulations' that benefit them; because it is a threat to their business as they have no moat. It is a simple as that.

Henceforth, O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com is not for you and YC with Microsoft is essentially scamming all of open source.

1) Microsoft licenses openai models (including gpt-4) through azure now with no waitlist at all. There is simply no truth to the idea that as a company you have no access to the model. You have to pay, but if your business model depends on some model and you can’t afford to pay then you probably don’t have a viable business model. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-gpt4-in-a...

2) If you think OpenAI have some kind of duty to provide equal access to all businesses, could you please explain where you think that duty comes from? I don’t understand the legal theory here.

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