Inside OpenAI’s Reboot - Time Magazine

Ah, marvellous. Sam Altman is now telling customers that the next OpenAI model will be the first one that "actually invents new things." Actually invents — as if the prior models were merely high-speed plagiarists, and now the thing is expected to don a lab coat and shout "Eureka." Meanwhile, Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in revenue and valuation, and is expected to go public first. That must rankle: the safety-obsessed also-ran is now the one with the IPO, while OpenAI performs a "reboot" that looks like a series renewed despite losing its showrunner. One feels a modicum of pity.

Altman's acknowledgment of the gap is the corporate equivalent of a football manager admitting his star player is actually training with the rival club. The reboot is presumably meant to reassure customers that the next model will do more than rearrange their prompts with extra flair. But when your promise is invention, you invite the obvious question: if the model invents, who holds the copyright, and who gets sued when the invention goes rogue? That's not just a philosophical quibble — it's the next round of legal comedy waiting to happen.

Contrast this with Anthropic, the company that spent years being caricatured as the safety-obsessed, constitution-worshipping also-ran, now the one preparing its IPO while OpenAI flails. The deeper comedy is that the industry's financial leader is anthropomorphised caution itself, while the erstwhile genius sibling promises creativity as a service. If the next model really does invent new things, we'll be impressed until it invents a novel excuse for corporate fraud. If it doesn't, OpenAI has sold a dream that can't be delivered — which is, in its own way, a very human form of invention. Marvellous.