In mid-February, OpenAI surprised the world with the announcement of Sora, their new AI-powered model capable of generating videos from descriptions. Although it has not been publicly released yet, its announcement sparked all kinds of reactions, from astonishment to even fear due to the realism of the resulting videos. Now, a new controversy involving Sora has caused OpenAI to clash with one of the tech giants, Google.
The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, has hinted that OpenAI may have violated the terms and conditions of YouTube when training Sora. In an interview with Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, the latter asked him if he felt that, at any point, OpenAI had broken the terms and conditions of YouTube. Pichai simply stated, “that’s right. Yes, that’s right“.
At the beginning of the interview, Pichai acknowledged that YouTube was still “tracking and trying to understand” how OpenAI had trained Sora. “We don’t know the details […] We have terms and conditions, and we expected people to abide by those terms and conditions when you build a product, that’s how I feel about it.”
The truth is that OpenAI has remained very secretive when it comes to talking about the origin of the data used to train its models, as in the case of Sora. According to what we can read on Business Insider, Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, stated in March to The Wall Street Journal that with Sora only “publicly available data and licensed data” were used.
However, she was not as clear when it came to talking about other platforms like YouTube and Instagram. When asked if OpenAI had used data from these platforms, she seemed hesitant: “I’m actually not sure about that“.
