This should tell you how unserious these "companies" are when they consider themselves the grand harbinger of the one and true "AGI" because their frontier models were able to solve (with great assistance) some sort of conjecture that was never taken seriously in the mathematical world but somehow is significant now because ???
I was wondering where this goal post would shift to next. So now instead of AI being incapable of doing something not in its training data it needs too much external help doing what no human could do, and what it came up with isn't even important anyways.
The companies can suck and their product can do amazing things at the same time.
It is interesting to see CEOs of big tech companies are so convinced they are always right that they start sidestepping any internal review of communication. Often to the detriment of the company.
“Nothing in my training data covers this, but if I had to guess, OpenAI may have released information about GPU support in Mac OS X early, pissing off Steve Jobs.”
Which, somehow, confused me even further. I get that it's a stylistic choice to make them easy to read or whatever, but my first thought was "wait, they just posted screenshots with the names censored like a bad Reddit post?"
This is pretty wild. Without context, it's barely coherent, but I guess they didn't want to say "Apple is suing us for X, Y, Z" because that makes them look bad. But there's just no upside to publishing this:
If you don't know what's going on, this blog post is nonsensical and makes OpenAI look weird.
If you do know what's going on, you'll immediately notice they don't address 80% of the stuff Apple is accusing them of, which makes OpenAI look dishonest.
It just seems incredibly unprofessional and ill-considered.
It's always suspect when one side tries to argue their case in the court of public opinion.
Frankly, it's a big red flag for me and immediately casts suspicion on said party. I mean, do you think you're going to lose in court and so you're trying to get out ahead of that?
No. This is a fucking legal case. It will be decided in the courtroom, not on the internet.
Posting this is insane in the sense of "What will posting this possibly improve for OpenAI?"
It's not going to change the court case. It's not going to impress professional adults.
I guess... teenage reddit users with too much time on their hands who are fans of OpenAI? Though struggling to see how that demo would care about a theft of trade secrets case.
Whatever executive decision-making thread led to this being released needs to be recalibrated. I'd expect >13 year old maturity from a company even 1/10 the size of OpenAI.
OpenAI needs mass consumer buy in because a large part of their strategy is ad supported consumer use. Bad pr pushes those users away. A lot of people have teenage Reddit user mindset
I'm struggling to imagine someone like that who also cares about the minutiae of this case. Or heck, who even knows this case exists.
"OpenAI is so inept at system isolation that it accidentally hacked Huggingface" seems like a more important PR fire to put out. (Whether or not that breach was artificially manufactured)
Full self driving teslas on the moon any day now. AI data centers in space! We’re all going to be rich! What a whacked out timeline where this is the richest man.
Exactly. This reads like someone decided PR firms don't know what they're doing and decided to handle it themselves.
But... it turns out that professional people and consulting companies who have years of experience in a subject area might have something to offer. Who knew?!
Not to that extent though. For OpenAI the PR investment is disproportionate.
Regular companies have people that talk to the media or maybe run some ads. OpenAI is trying to have in-house media.
For a frontier lab it’s striking just how much energy (and dough) goes into this.
You’re right of course that PR exists elsewhere, but that obviously true assertion misses the finer details of how PR works at OpenAI. In doing so it functions as a thought-terminating cliché.
Direct and unrehearsed doesn't seem like the right tack for a high-stakes legal dispute between two (allegedly) trillion-dollar companies. Especially since they've not been able to make a coherent point here.
Yes, we've built a society where being two-faced and false is rewarded. The least we can do is temper our criticism when someone "fails" to adhere to that.
I get what you're saying, but this seems like the wrong vehicle. I mean these are two corporations engaged in a huge and expensive legal battle—we're not talking about a personal he-said/she-said spat on X.
You got your crude analogy backwards - it is the calculated, tactical PR-speak that is more like shitting up the public square, than the naive, honest-if-self-serving speech.
Did no one ever explain to you why you should wear nice clothes to a job interview? Or a wedding?
Not simply that you should, but why? Conducting onesself with decorum and professionalism in certain contexts is not about deception. It's about respecting other people, both individually/directly, and the communal space.
Even if you consciously don't care about or respect anyone else, "everyone else is wrong for not being be ok with my t-shirt and flipflops" it's still simply a self-own to present this image of someone who lacks such a minimum level of perception.
A business communique like this isn't a performance art piece where it's fine if most people react badly to it because the whole point was to make people think about their reactions or reflect on some aspect of life. It's not the time or place to make a chocolate Jesus.
It's just some infants in pants they don't know how to fill, not "refreshing honesty".
Is that what we're calling PR-department-written say-nothing corporate lawyerspeak? "Decorum"?
I guess when people get banned, and only get cited a vague "violation of our terms of service", they should be grateful for how much professionalism and respect they're being shown? And actually being told what you are accused of is equivalent to wearing flip-flops to a wedding?
From: Che Chang
Date: Feb 23, 2026, at 8:04 PM
Subject: Re: Former Apple Employees at OpenAI Retaining Non-public, Confidential, and Proprietary Information
To:
Hi [Apple in-house legal counsel] and [Apple in-house legal counsel],
This guy from Weil claims to be representing you. For some reason, he is lying about speaking with me on the phone. I don't know who he is and we have never spoken.
I don't know what the point of his lie is, but could you please confirm if he is actually representing you, and if so, whether you have other counsel you can use. I don’t think interacting through him is appropriate given this behavior.
---
So, a lawyer emailed the wrong person. That's it. And they use that as a peg to hang their whole case on. I guess GPT 6 thought this was the real smoking gun!
I would expect them to start out with something like Apple is suing us for yada yada yada, but instead it reads like the diary of a hurt teenager.