Kris Holland
1d Edited

𝘽𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙉𝙚𝙬𝙨 – OpenAI acquires Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. and it’s subsidiary, Merriam-Webster in order to resolve all copyright lawsuits in one stroke.

Since the original release of ChatGPT, OpenAI has been widely accused of copyright infringement for industrial-scale ingestion of the entirety of human knowledge and creation. In order to solve this problem once and for all, OpenAI has acquired both Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., and Merriam-Webster, and, with it, the rights to the entirety of the English language.

“As I’ve said previously, it is impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. We have spent immense time and treasure trying to find a way around this problem that wouldn’t cost us several trillion dollars,” said Sam Altman in a statement. “We asked our most advanced and unreleased version of GPT what the solution was, and the solution was elegant, and only cost $8M in compute. It told us to buy Encyclopædia Britannica and Merriam-Webster—own the encyclopedia and dictionary, and thus own all copyrighted material via transitive properties. Absolute genius.”

The deal, which dramatically overvalued the companies at $16B USD, is set to close Friday.

Swiss financier Jacob E. Safra, the owner of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1996, was heard giggling profusely, but otherwise had no comment.

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