Algorithmic disgorgement is a penalty the FTC agency can wield against companies that used deceptive data practices to build algorithmic systems. The punishment: They have to destroy ill-gotten data and the models built with it.
Will any US governmental institutions (e.g., a court following a lawsuit by individuals, the FTC, the United States Copyright Office, etc.) use this power to force OpenAI to delete at least one of the mainline GPT models?
The injunction must be given before this market closes to count toward a YES resolution. Whether OpenAI complies is irrelevant to the resolution.
I created an extended timeline for the end of 2026 here, given that a lot of legal fights are just getting started: https://manifold.markets/jgyou/will-a-us-entity-force-openai-to-de-6e8c9461db85
Surely the OpenAI meltdown impacts this market somehow?
@jgyou Even if you extended it indefinitely "until OpenAI no longer exists as a company", I would still think it's really unlikely. But I might not bet on it with such an indefinite timeline, so the displayed probability might look higher.
@jgyou I'm on the YES side, but honestly I can see the NO case. Specifics:
What happens if they contest it? Will the courts support this? The justification for this remedy seems like it isn't well supported. It's an order, not a court ruling, and it's not clear what happens if the company says "no". Things get messy fast.
How does this compare to financial settlements, fines, and related penalties? Are we sure that OpenAI would rather delete things that negotiate something? That adds more mess. In practice I think it would be weird for a court to enforce this remedy instead of simple financial damages.
So I think this happens in situations where people object strongly, regulators and courts decide they're justified, and the owners of the model decide they'd prefer to delete the model instead of settle the case. That seems like it requires the model to be weirdly low-value.
Anyway, I'm betting yes... but in the sense of "more likely than market price", not "more likely than not, overall".
This seems untrue to me. The US justice system doesn't suffer fools when the fools are large corporations, flagrantly ignoring judgements is met with rapidly growing fines, which can eventually be enforced by seizing anything in US jurisdiction. And when you combine OpenAI's reliance on the US economic and financial system for: paying employees, recruiting new employees, 8-9 figures of investment and revenue , patnership with microsoft for current and future compute, and selling products to US citizens and businesses via standard payment methods ... a rogue OpenAI would eventually just be prevented from doing any of those things in the US by the (very well developed) enforcement mechanisms. The legal arguments are bad though, I think
@jacksonpolack You make good points there. open ai in particular is going to be hard to disentangle from the US, but ten good hackers with enough crypto to buy a ton of compute from wherever might get just as good as openAI
What if OpenAI drops their model because the FTC writes a scary letter threatening to go to court, but it never ends up in front of a judge? Does that count for YES?
@jgyou I think it's "NO" because the description requires an injunction and hence a judge, but just wanted to check for edge cases before I treat this as an interest rate market.
Similarly, being ordered to stop giving or selling access shouldn't count for YES, as long as the model(and all backups) aren't ordered deleted.
@ZviMowshowitz If you're really ambivalent you can get market notifications by clicking the heart button up top. (Big fan of the Substack btw)
@Symmetry They invented the concept. No one gave them any such competency. They ordered someone company to do it and the company complied. That does not prove they have any such competency.
For an informed recent view: https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/pamela-samuelson-uc-berkeley-2023-08-16
This is a more general version of this market: https://manifold.markets/jgyou/will-the-ftc-force-openai-to-delete