| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today Evan Ratliff brings us a story about Guy Ravine's Open AI (with a space), which owns a trademark and website that OpenAI (no space) wants. What can their lawsuits tell us about the future of AI—and who wins in Silicon Valley? You can find the whole story online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. It sounded like the setup to a joke, and for a while I thought it was: A company called OpenAI sues a company called Open AI. … The case, formally named OpenAI Inc. v. Open Artificial Intelligence Inc., showed up on the docket for the US District Court in Northern California, to zero fanfare, in August of last year. Companies with near-identical names entangled in a lawsuit usually means trademark infringement—more the makings of a one-liner than a riveting story. Still, it did involve the OpenAI, the generative AI kingpin and maker of ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft Corp. to the tune of (at the time) $13 billion. I pulled some of the case documents and immediately found what seemed like the punch line. Open Artificial Intelligence Inc., aka the other Open AI (with a space), was in fact just one guy, named Guy. Guy Ravine, according to the suit, was a self-styled Silicon Valley technologist who'd managed to grab the URL open.ai back in 2015, before OpenAI (no space) launched. When Sam Altman and Greg Brockman announced their venture to the world that Dec. 11, they'd been forced to go with the less buzzy openai.com. Ravine then appeared to have moved beyond domain squatting, filing for a trademark on the name "Open AI" (with a space) on the very evening Altman and Brockman made their announcement. Scanning the documents, I had to respect the hustle. Ravine asserted fantastically that he'd been working on an idea identical to Altman and Brockman's. This wasn't the first time he'd had a world-changing innovation yanked out from under him, either. He professed to have invented the video-sharing technology later made famous by Snapchat and TikTok. For someone making such sensational claims, however, Ravine had almost no online footprint. What little biographical information I did find lived on ancient-looking websites, sometimes with the same low-res photograph of a smiling man with a receding hairline. I suspected he might be a scammer, or a kook, and OpenAI's lawyers seemed to agree. Their filings unsubtly mocked Ravine and implied a shakedown. One quoted an email Ravine sent to Altman in 2022, which noted that "Elon Musk paid $11 million for the Tesla domain and trademark in 2017. As we both know, OpenAI holds the potential to become larger than Tesla … So the ultimate value of the domain and the brand are substantial."  Illustration: Antoine Maillard for Bloomberg Businessweek OpenAI asked the federal judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, to bar Ravine from using the name until the lawsuit was resolved. It seemed that his quixotic argument, about a parallel open artificial intelligence effort, stood little to no chance, up against some of the most formidable lawyers in the Bay Area, backed by OpenAI's functionally infinite pockets. Sure enough, in February Gonzalez Rogers issued a preliminary injunction against Ravine, forcing him to take down his website and delete all references to "Open AI." The evidence, she wrote, "paints a troubling picture of defendant Ravine's representations." She strongly implied, in other words, that he was full of it. Ravine fired his attorneys. That, I figured, was pretty much that. But then in April, a curious document appeared on the court docket. Ravine's new lawyers had filed a 100-page countersuit against OpenAI, Altman and Brockman. In it, Ravine claimed that in 2015 he'd actually been in discussions to raise $100 million for his open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI) project. He'd pitched Open AI (sometimes calling it Open.AI) to Silicon Valley luminaries including Google's Larry Page, Meta Platforms' chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, Google director of research Peter Norvig, Stripe Chief Executive Officer Patrick Collison and former Apple executive Tom Gruber, the co-creator of Siri. This wasn't a case of parallel invention, Ravine alleged, but of theft: Altman and Brockman stole their "recipe" from him. The countersuit included a supposed statement from LeCun, saying "more people need to know about this." And, from Gruber: "It is tragic that the hijacking of Open AI from Guy Ravine may have historic consequences." Honestly, it sounded like madness. A hundred million dollars? Historic consequences? I wondered if Ravine invented the quotes to back up his unhinged assertions. So I contacted Gruber, a highly respected voice in AI, and asked him if he was aware of the lawsuit. Of course, he said. He'd given an official declaration. Wait, did he believe Ravine was for real? Gruber was unequivocal. "He was a serious AI dude from the beginning," he said. "I have my email records from it: I'm absolutely sure he was pitching me Open AI at least six months before Altman showed up." Did that mean Ravine was really talking to those other luminaries? "I mean, I saw him pitch to Larry Page," Gruber said. In his telling, Ravine was hardly the grifter portrayed in the lawsuit. He was a righteous underdog. "He's not a charismatic, you know, Sam Altman," Gruber said, "but he's smart and he's honest." He'd gotten there first, trademarked his work, and now OpenAI was trying to "erase him from the story." Gruber, who's gone on to advise other AI efforts since leaving Apple, even invested in a company Ravine founded. As for who was shaking down whom, Gruber reminded me that it was OpenAI who sued Ravine, not the other way around. "It's just not fair, that's all I'm saying." The joke, I realized, might be on me. So I decided to seek out Guy Ravine myself. The story I found was less about a simple trademark dispute and more about the struggle to turn ideas into reality, and about who and what determine Silicon Valley's winners and losers. To OpenAI, it may have seemed a simple case of a jealous troll appropriating its hard-won success. "We took legal action to stop the intentional use of OpenAI from confusing and misleading our users," a company spokesperson said, adding: "He also claims to have invented various successful tech companies in the past." But for Ravine, the case was about a vision, his vision, for a powerful technology controlled not by companies but by all of humanity—and how its appropriation poisoned an industry from inception. Keep reading: Why OpenAI Is at War With an Obscure Idea Man And if you like this newsletter: Don't miss Bloomberg's new Weekend Edition, a collection of idea-driven essays, reviews and stories on the fascinating places where finance, life and culture meet. Saturday's Weekend Edition newsletter serves as a guide to the latest. Read the first issue here, and sign up for e-mail delivery. | 
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