When Brad Lightcap joined OpenAI full-time in 2018, the company didn’t have a real product, let alone a business model. There were just 40 people on staff and OpenAI had yet to launch a for-profit arm. “It was pretty sleepy, and very researchy,” Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, told me in an interview at the startup’s San Francisco headquarters on Monday. It’s not sleepy anymore. Now Lightcap is tasked with turning Silicon Valley’s most high-profile startup into a mature business. Lightcap says he has the “fortunate problem” of having too much demand for OpenAI’s products to immediately satisfy. But his job also comes with unique challenges. Lightcap is now leading negotiations with media companies to license their content to train its AI tools while battling a lawsuit from the New York Times, which has accused OpenAI of using its copyrighted works without permission. It’s Lightcap’s responsibility to navigate that tension and prove to publishers that he, and OpenAI, are good faith partners. “If you look back in the last 20 plus years, how the media and technology industry related to one another hasn’t always been friendly,” said Lightcap. “There’s been a lot of hand-wringing and accusations and finger pointing…It doesn’t have to be that way going forward. It doesn’t have to be that way around this technology.” Despite inheriting some baggage from old media-tech clashes, Lightcap and OpenAI have been able to negotiate deals with Axel Springer and The Associated Press. OpenAI is now having talks with dozens of other publications, including heavy-hitters like CNN, Fox and Time, as Bloomberg first reported.
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