The Scandals Behind ChatGPT
5/28/202638 min
You may use ChatGPT or Claude every day, but how much do you know about the guys running those companies? One of them, Sam Altman, has come under a ton of fire recently. He transformed OpenAI from a nonprofit lab into one of the most powerful and controversial companies in Silicon Valley, raising billions in funding and steering the development of ChatGPT into a product used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. But Andrew Marantz, staff writer at The New Yorker, spent 18 months co-authoring an article with Ronan Farrow that asks if he can be trusted. Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Infamous show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Read Vanessa’s book, Blurred Lines: Sex, Power and Consent on Campus, and check out Natalie on Instagram at @natrobe To connect with Infamous's creative team, join the community at joincampsidemedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsNatalie Robehmed· Host0:00
[crickets chirping] Campside Media. [upbeat music] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Infamous, a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. So you may have seen that the company behind ChatGPT and its co-founder, Sam Altman, were being sued by Elon Musk in a $150 billion, yes, I said billion dollar lawsuit, with Elon Musk accusing Sam Altman of basically stealing the company and using it to enrich himself, which is in some ways very rich from Elon Musk, who is within, I guess, some striking distance of becoming the world's first trillionaire, or he wishes he was. But last week, a federal jury rejected Elon Musk's lawsuit, saying that Musk waited too long to file it, which was true. He was way not in the statute of limitations, but he figured he'd go for it anyway. Musk then dismissed this decision as a, quote, "calendar technicality" in a post on X, and his lawyer vowed to appeal. In any case, assuming he loses the appeal, which he probably will, the end of this lawsuit means that Elon Musk has failed to stop the rise of the company named OpenAI, and that is the company that makes ChatGPT. And it is a company that he actually helped create back in 2015. So OpenAI's origin story, which is what we're talking about today,