OpenAI alleges New York Times ‘hacked’ ChatGPT for lawsuit evidence

Published

2 months ago

February 27, 2024

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OpenAI asked a judge to dismiss parts of The New York Times‘ lawsuit against it, alleging that the media company “paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products,” such as ChatGPT, to generate 100 examples of copyright infringement for its case.

In a filing Monday in Manhattan federal court, OpenAI alleged it took the Times “tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results,” and that the company did so using “deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.”

“Normal people do not use OpenAI’s products in this way,” OpenAI wrote in the filing.

The “hacking” that OpenAI alleges in the filing could also be called prompt engineering or “red-teaming,” a common way for artificial intelligence trust and safety teams, ethicists, academics and tech companies to “stress-test” AI systems for vulnerabilities. It’s a common practice in the AI industry and a popular way to alert companies to issues within their systems, similar to how cybersecurity professionals stress-test companies’ websites for weaknesses.

The New York Times did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The filing comes as a broader battle heats up between OpenAI and publishers, authors and artists over using copyrighted material for AI training data, including the high-profile Times lawsuit, which some see as a watershed moment for the industry. The news outlet’s lawsuit, filed in December, seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for billions of dollars in damages.

In the past, OpenAI has said it’s “impossible” to train top AI models without copyrighted works.

“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” OpenAI wrote in a filing last month in the U.K., in response to an inquiry from the U.K. House of Lords.

“Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens,” OpenAI continued in the filing.

As recently as last month, in Davos, Switzerland, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was “surprised” by the Times’ lawsuit, saying OpenAI’s models didn’t need to train on the publisher’s data.

“We actually don’t need to train on their data,” Altman said at an event organized by Bloomberg in Davos. “I think this is something that people don’t understand. Any one particular training source, it doesn’t move the needle for us that much.”

Although one publisher may not make a difference in ChatGPT’s operating abilities, OpenAI’s filing suggests that a decision by many publishers to opt out may have an effect. In recent months, the company began courting publishers to allow content to be used for training data.

The company has already struck deals with Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate that owns Business Insider, Morning Brew and other outlets, and is also reportedly in talks with CNN, Fox Corp. and Time to license their work.

“We expect our ongoing negotiations with others to yield additional partnerships soon,” OpenAI wrote in the filing.

In the filing and its blog posts, OpenAI has highlighted its opt-out process for publishers, which allows outlets to prohibit the company’s web crawler from accessing their websites. But in the filing, OpenAI says the content is vital to training today’s AI models.

“While we look forward to continuing to develop additional mechanisms to empower rightsholders to opt-out of training, we are actively engaged with them to find mutually beneficial arrangements to gain access to materials that are otherwise inaccessible, and also to display content in ways that go beyond what copyright law otherwise allows,” the company wrote.

— CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.

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Environment

Polestar 2 lease price drops to $299 a month thanks to new $10k discount

Published

1 hour ago

May 8, 2024

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Polestar 2 lease price drops to 9 a month thanks to new k discount

Thanks to the $10,000 Polestar Clean Vehicle Incentive introduced last week, 2024 Polestar 2 lease prices are now over $120 a month cheaper.

CarsDirect reports that through May 31, the 2024 Polestar 2 Long Range Dual Motor can be leased for $299 for 27 months with $3,299 due at signing.

The auto research portal says that’s a $50 drop in the monthly payment with $2,050 less required at signing. As a result, the effective cost fell $126, from $547 per month to $421 before taxes & fees.

The Polestar 2 Dual Motor – list price $55,300 – is a much better deal to lease than the Single Motor model – list price $49,900 – because amazingly, they have the same lease price. That’s basically a free upgrade to the Dual Motor model.

The Polestar 2 first made its debut in 2019 as the automaker’s first fully electric car. It launched in mid-2020 and the milestone 150,000th car rolled off the assembly line in August 2023.

The Polestar 2 is expected to be phased out in 2027, and company says the Polestar 7 will succeed it.

Click here to find a local dealer that may have the Polestar 2 in stock. –affiliate*

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Environment

When will Tesla cars be capable of unsupervised full self-driving (SAE Level 5)?

Published

4 hours ago

May 8, 2024

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Environment

Elon Musk outlines upcoming Tesla Full Self-Driving updates

Published

5 hours ago

May 8, 2024

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Elon Musk outlines upcoming Tesla Full Self-Driving updates

Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta 10.69 barrier

Elon Musk has given an update with an outline for Tesla’s upcoming Full Self-Driving (FSD) software updates.

With FSD v12 and the upcoming launch of Tesla’s dedicated Robotaxi, there’s a lot of excitement around Tesla’s self-driving effort.

Musk is again in the too-familiar position of predicting that the automaker is close to releasing a true self-driving system, but the path to get there is still far from clear.

Now the CEO is providing some new comments on the upcoming release schedule for FSD:

“12.4 has almost completely retrained models. The final touches are for comfort, as it sometimes accelerates or brakes too fast for most people’s taste.”

Tesla FSD drivers are currently on 12.3.6 and the .4 update is expected to be a bigger step change, which Musk appears to confirm by saying that Tesla “completely retrained” the models.

The CEO recently said that Tesla is no longer constrained by training compute power after bringing more capacity online, giving the FSD team more opportunities to retrain neural nets with increasingly cleaner data.

Musk then continued about Tesla’s upcoming updates:

12.5 and 12.6 are in various stages of testing. We’re getting into rare, complex situations, for example: going down a narrow, one-way road, encountering a road closure and having to reverse out to find a new route. That closure also needs to be communicated to the rest of the fleet, so you don’t get a whole bunch of Teslas stuck down a road.

There’s no timeline for these upcoming updates beyond the fact that they are currently in internal testing, but Musk did say that v12.4 could come to the Tesla fleet as soon next week.

Electrek’s Take

Again, I’ve been impressed with v12.3.3-4. I’ve just got v12.3.6, but I haven’t had time to test it yet. I plan to do that this weekend. Also, I’ve been saying that if I start seeing decent improvements with the upcoming updates, I think I’ll start to see a clearer path to Tesla finally delivering on its promise – or at least a level 4 self-driving system.

However, as usual, when talking about FSD and especially when praising the system, I think it’s important to remind everyone that the keyword in ‘Supervised Full Self-Driving’ is ‘Supervised.’ Drivers need to remain attentive at all times and ready to take control.

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