Why Apple Sued OpenAI; New York Takes On Data Centers; Cyclosporiasis Outbreak

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1:54Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Contributing Editor. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. And I'm Leah Figer, Director of Politics and Science. This week, we're discussing OpenAI's ongoing drama, both legal and reputational. Last Friday, Apple sued the company, basically alleging that OpenAI has been stealing confidential hardware secrets. And now this week, Wired learned that some OpenAI employees are launching a super PAC to push for AI guardrails.

2:36We'll get into all those details and whether these developments could further hurt OpenAI, particularly in its fight against Anthropic. Also on the AI front, this week New York State officially passed the first statewide data center moratorium. We'll dive into what that means exactly and whether this move could pave the way for other states to follow suit. We'll also talk about how some members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, used AI to actually shape housing policy. And we're going to check in on the disease sweeping the nation, cyclosporiasis, which is causing quote-unquote turbo diarrhea across the country.

3:15Okay, you guys, I'm really excited to start with this OpenAI drama because the company has been in the headlines a lot lately and not for fantastic reasons. So basically what happened was last Friday, Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for allegedly stealing information like unreleased iPhone parts and prototypes, confidential designs, documents about secret projects. That accusation sucks for OpenAI. It's pretty intense, but it gets really messy because Apple is basically saying that this theft, this alleged theft, mostly happened through former employees. OpenAI's chief hardware officer, Tang Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple, is named in the lawsuit and accused of encouraging people who are leaving Apple to bring with them proprietary information and unreleased technology.

4:03Brian, I just, I'm so curious what you thought when this dropped. I think it's fascinating. and there's a lot of really interesting accusations in there. I think it's also like, it's part of Apple's playbook that we haven't seen in a while, but it is something that Apple has sort of done or threatened to do before. Tony Fidel, who is a longtime Apple guy, but then went on to start Nest, the thermostat company. He had also, I think he told a story recently in the wake of all this about how when he had started Nest, he hired several hundred Apple employees. Steve Jobs called him, threatened to sue, screamed bloody murder.

4:43But what I thought Fidel said was interesting, and I don't know that applies directly here, but reportedly what he says is that he said, it's my job to hire great people. It's your job to keep them. I forget that Apple is a pretty litigious company. They've famously sued employees for supposedly leaking stuff or taking proprietary stuff with them when they left Apple, which, you know, companies will do occasionally, but particularly for leaks, like it is kind of rare to see lawsuits come. Um, but this is the area that I feel like Apple cares most about. It is so secretive about its products that when that stuff starts to get out of its hands, I think they really are quick to like jump on it.

5:25My take here and Leah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts is that this isn't about getting like damages from open AI. I think what Apple actually wants is to slow down OpenAI's hardware ambitions because it's really continuing. Apple is continuing to go all in on the iPhone as like the primary computing platform for the AI era. And I do think that if we see an audio first platform that works better for stuff where you do not need to look at a screen and you can just talk to an agent like that could be intimidating for them. I think this is what's interesting to me too, is some reporting came out this week also about what the device is eventually going to look like.

6:06You know, it's going to be like a speaker. It's going to have some motorized elements or so it'll like move in some capacity. Reese Rogers, I hope he doesn't mind my sharing, said it sounded like a Furby, which I think is probably right. But look, I'm really, if OpenAI is banking on hardware, I am skeptical. I feel like ultimately Apple can still make a speaker. And because also because Apple is sort of a more neutral party in all this, Apple can make a speaker that has a few different AI options to choose from potentially or has Siri AI, which is one from Gemini. And ultimately, I do think it's going to come down to the device that you use most of the time is going to be the phone.

6:49Well, I mean, that has been true for a long time. And I think we've seen even Apple try and get away from like this very screen heavy life that we're all living like with the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro. Thank you so much. You don't think about Vision Pro every day? No, I have to say that it lived and died very quickly and I haven't thought about it since. But I think the issue, and this has been true for other AI hardware devices, like the famous like pin from Humane AI and all of that. It's like, there just are many things that are better to do on a screen. And I don't think that's going to change.

7:21However, if you can get agents and voice mode that works really, really well, there are, you know, other things that you really could just ask an agent to execute for you. and you might prefer not to look at a screen the whole time. And so I personally, as someone who has a very tortured relationship with my screens, I'm like ready for something that could work a little bit better, but it's hard to execute correctly. And I don't think we've seen a product so far that has been able to do that. Just to ground what we're talking about a little bit more, OpenAI has hired more than 400 former Apple employees, according to the lawsuit.

7:59And last Last year, it paid$6.5 billion to acquire a startup called IO Products that was co-founded by longtime Apple executives, including Tan, Scott Cannon, Evans Hinckley, and the most famous person, Johnny Ive. What I am most excited about, about this whole process is we're not even really there yet, is that lawsuits mean discovery. And discovery means we're going to get to read so many emails of these companies talking trash about each other and themselves. And it's going to be such a delight. It's always a joy when these things happen. No one is cattier than a lawyer with an IP issue. Put that on a mug, Zoe.

8:41They are. Wow. Do we have merch yet? Can that be our merch? That's our merch. Yeah. That's our merch. You know, opening eyes headaches are not just limited to the Apple lawsuit this week. Wired learned that opening eye staffers are funding a rival super PAC to advocate for tighter regulations on frontier AI labs. It's a rival, of course, to all of the money that people like Greg Brockman, OpenAI executive, and others have put towards boosting AI and shutting down guardrails. This new super PAC called Guardrails Alliance, catchy, it launched last month. Sounds like an insurance plan. It does. It really, and like not one that you necessarily want to sign up for.

9:20It's like the only one that'll give you a mortgage. It launched last month with$5 million in initial funding. It bills itself as a populist effort by tech workers, labor unions, and other groups. And here's the key aspect. It's going to be a counterweight to that$100 million leading the future fund that we talked about a second ago. Right. The way you said 5 million, it was like 5 million was a lot. And I was like, it seems like I'm trying to hype. I mean, it's Guardrails Alliance. They need a little bit of a boost. Yeah, no, they do. I have been kind of waiting for this moment, I will say, since we found out that Greg Brockman was donating so much money to MAGA and Trump-related causes.

9:59In his view, and Maxwell Zeff, Wired Reporter, has reported on this pretty extensively, it's really all about boosting AI and AI policy. And I think his view and the view of many others in the industry is that Trump and those aligned with him are more favorable toward a growth that all costs, like AI first policy agenda. But if you've talked to like any average researcher, overwhelmingly, like the companies are filled with younger employees who are pretty liberal. And so that tension felt potentially really messy to me. And OpenAI still has a culture where people are willing to push back and speak out.

10:41Like if you look at their Slack, there is kind of, it has that like earlier tech feel of people really like working out the problems in public, even though this stuff does tend to leak so much. At the same time, like the composition of the company is really changing. There are these newer employees that have been brought in over the past year or two. I've heard some employees call them the MAGA blondes. I honestly don't even know if they are blonde or MAGA oriented, but I think there's this feeling that OpenAI is really changing and there is kind of like the Trump aligned contingent and then there's the the more kind of liberal contingent look this is so much to me the grassroots versus the billionaire but it's all from within the same company which is we talk about Silicon Valley sometimes as a monolith but it is so clearly not a monolith you have so many different people at different rungs and I was really taken with the fact that like one of the largest donors was a research engineer he He gave 200K, research engineer Juan Felipe Saron-Rube, and he gave 200K and has spent years working on the company's strategies for mitigating potential societal harms caused by AI.

11:52I would love to see a performance review of him after all of this is done. And I actually really do wonder if people are nervous about this. Are there stopgaps, Zoe, at these kinds of companies to prevent perhaps a more Trump-aligned manager from taking it out on a more liberal coded person, especially when this is playing out financially, like in political races, and will certainly have impact? Yeah. I mean, look, OpenAI is a relatively mature company. It has processes as an HR department. Like I don't, it's not to say this stuff can't happen. It absolutely can. And we've seen it happen before.

12:33But I think until it becomes a major issue, until we see this fight actually impact the work and OpenAI's ability to ship new models, frankly, I think they're going to go with a line of like, you know, we have an open culture. People are allowed to disagree. This is totally fine. And they'll try and spin it almost as a positive. And we'll see. Speaking of AI and politics, I'm going to talk about one of my favorite topics, as always, Doge, Department of Government Efficiency, started by Elon Musk. It's still in the news, and it is in the news for a very specific reason for us this week, which is we can't get more news out about it.

13:15Members of Doge who are working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, used AI to inform policy decisions. This is something that we were reporting on and figured out last year. But now the agency appears to be denying Freedom of Information Act requests for information on the development and the use of the AI tools and the way they actually informed these policy decisions. This all came out according to documents obtained by a FOIA request from Democracy Forward, which is a nonprofit legal organization. And it's pretty concerning. You would assume that like a year after some of this dust has settled that we'd be able to get a little bit more information.

13:52and from government agency to government agency, HUD really is the latest example here. We've been just getting tons of stonewalling on like additional further details as to like what Doge has been up to, the access they had, the materials they used. It's very much about the fact that they used AI, but it's also how did they use AI? What is still left in the systems? And like, what were the regulations there? What got blown by? Who knew about this? And these are so many important details that are just missing. And especially now as people are like going back and trying to untangle the spaghetti web that was like left in their steed.

14:29It's very frustrating for employees, understandably, and frankly should be frustrating for anyone who is going to be impacted by housing policy in the next 20 years in America. AI tools can be used in ways that are very legitimate and helpful. If you told me that they were using AI for like research and checking their sources, I would be like, seems smart. Cool. And then it can be used in ways that are, you know, possibly introducing discrimination. It could be used, you know, in ways that some would call cheating, like the just huge range, um, and the types of tools available. They create a lot of questions and questions that I would say like the public is entitled to some form of answers on.

15:17Um, but like you said, right now we're being a little bit stonewalled. You're 100 % right, Zoe. And in this specific case, HUD employees who spoke to Wired at the time that this all was coming out found that these Doge employees were using AI to identify agency rules for potential rescission or contract cancellations. And this was happening across government. But again, I just want to be so clear about what this means as they were saying, here's this massive list of contracts. What do you think we should cut here and just kind of like, let's see what happens. Again, We don't have more details on everything that got cut, the way that it got cut, the way that it all went down, what we're missing now as a result.

15:54Like, it's all still coming together. And that makes it so much more unfortunate. And especially when you're also thinking about the people that were doing this, that were actually employing the AI. Wired had reported that Christopher Sweet, who was then a third-year student at the University of Chicago, was one of the people really involved in this effort. as was Scott Langmack who came to Doge from a property technology startup called Cocoon. So it's not like these were people who were, A, even necessarily that well-versed in government work by any means. But then additionally, the idea of going through massive government contract lists with AI and being like, yep, good to go.

16:34So they're claiming this AI exemption, right? They're saying like, oh, we can't possibly release these to you because it was AI and AI is exempted for FOIA, which is not the case. But what's the, I guess, the two-parter, Leah, what are the implications of that? Like, are we seeing it beyond HUD or other agencies going to embrace this? And what's the next step? Do we go to the courts with this? Not we, but like, do people go to the courts with this to fight this? Probably. If like, this is information that the American public wants to know, if this is information that Democracy Forward decides is worth their time, there is no AI exemption under FOIA.

17:08AI talking to people and AI talking to each other is not privileged communications, which is the argument that was being made here. There are no laws in the U.S. that require the government to disclose if AI has been used in the creation of rules, policies, or regulation. And so simultaneously, a FOIA like this is the only way that you would find out. And saying that there is this AI exemption then just creates an entire black box. I would say also that it's not just like how they use the tools, but how the tools made the decisions that they made. Because anyone who's used AI agents at all knows that you can't just say like identify, you know, regulations that we should potentially do X, Y, Z to.

17:46Like you have to give them a lot of context. And then even then, it's very important to like interrogate the tools and say like, how did you make that decision so you can understand what the AI is taking into account and what it's ignoring. Like these tools are not completely neutral. They are built by humans. They have biases baked in. And I would sincerely hope, but I don't have that much hope, that like Doge was looking at all of that and not just like unleashing AI on these systems kind of willy-nilly. 100%. Zoe, how much hope do you actually have? I mean, I don't. Yeah, no. The last thing I want to leave you guys with of this too is that Lang Mac of the aforementioned property technology startup Cocoon, he's now the executive director of deregulation AI at the Office of Management and Budget, which falls under the executive office of the president, according to his LinkedIn.

18:46So it's not like this person has now disappeared into obscurity and his decision making or, you know, we actually don't know a ton about his decision making because they won't tell us. It gets to kind of continue being in this black box, which is, again, just to say that, like, it very much felt like Doge, like, swept in and swept out in the same wave of the year. But that's really not the case. Like, the people that got very involved and entrenched these policies from the beginning are still not just in government, but, like, officially in government. entrenched, serious roles, pay scales, et cetera.

19:20And it's a story we're paying really, really close attention to. And big ups to a senior reporter, Vittoria Elliott, for staying in the weeds on this for us. Okay. One more AI story. So New York became the first state in the country to impose a statewide moratorium on building new data centers. The moratorium was signed as an executive order by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and it puts into place a one-year pause on the development of large-scale data centers while the state develops new environmental and energy grid standards. The bottom line is progress shouldn't arrive with a higher utility bill, deleted water supply, or noise pollution.

20:00So we have no choice but to address these challenges created by these massive facilities. That is why today I'll be signing the nation's first ever statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers. Well, there's a few caveats to just point out, and then I want to hear what you guys have to say. One, this moratorium applies only to large-scale data centers, so 50 megawatts or more, and it doesn't affect facilities that have already started construction or have existing permits. And it'll also lift once the state finalizes a generic environmental and impact statement. So that could be a year or more out.

20:43The thing that I want to say is that I feel like there are two stories that this moratorium is wrestling with. There's like the national story, which is we actually need AI in this country. It's a big part of our economy. And it's like, in some ways, the big bet we have taken, we don't have a lot else it feels like right now. And then, I mean, EVs are done. So this is it. And then there's the local story, which is, it is very uncomfortable. And it frankly sucks to live near a data center. It does spike your energy bill. It does suck up a lot of water. And those things are going to continue being in tension.

21:20Hello, I'm Joseph Cox, host of the 404 Media Podcast. Every week we break tech news you can't get anywhere else. That includes surveillance. This idea that Ring is going to zero out crime. It's not. AI. AI is going to stick around in some fashion. That doesn't mean that the vision that these companies are selling us is how it has to be and big tech companies. This is a serious crime. It's being enabled by Apple and Google through the app stores. Our journalism is by humans for humans. Find the 404 Media Podcast wherever you listen and on YouTube too. I have to bring this up because data centers right now on a large scale are kind of unpopular.

22:01They're just like ultimately unpopular. I feel like every other headline is like, and this community is rebelling against this and this community is rebelling against this. Other states have tried and failed to actually pass a similar moratorium. So I'm kind of curious how New York's is going to go. And I also have to tell you guys that I was, before we recorded this podcast, which we record on Wednesdays, this is going to be released to you all on Thursday morning. I was refreshing True Social, convinced that Trump was going to weigh in. I was like absolutely positive. And he did. At 1239, Trump weighs in and goes, one of the biggest driving forces in the future for jobs are data centers.

22:39Just imagine a lot of random capitalization in there. They are big, strong, bold, and money machines for the state in which they are built. Governor Kathy Hochul, for political reasons, has terminated all data centers being built or to be built in New York State. These companies are now being sought in Alabama, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and many other states. But the taxes and the job amount to liquid gold. New York State has made a terrible decision. That's not true. He continues and continues and continues. Because I mean, like from the political side of all this, and I know that there is so much we need to like unpack with like the tech and the climate and everything.

23:11Whoever told Donald Trump that data centers was going to be like his winning issue for midterms. I want to be in a room with them like this. It's incredible. I'm really surprised because as Zoe and I both muttered while you were saying that he's wrong. Like his arguments are wrong. There is an argument he could make. Right. Similar to what Zoe made. that's right in his wheelhouse. It's an America first argument. It is that it is crucial. Like AI is the next space race. We need to beat China. We need data centers to do that. Ask not what you can do for your country. He gets there in the end. No, wait, other way around, other way around.

23:46By the end, he gets there. The radical left Democrats must not be allowed to cause us to lose data centers, AI, and all of this incredible new technology to China and other countries, President Donald J. Trump. He does get there. Again, however, littered with errors and also I think missing like a really key part of his electorate that is not just in blue states that's going, how on earth am I supposed to pay for this and live with this? Right. And that, I mean, that is the issue. And we've seen other states pass regulations. Ultimately, this is my take. I think we need to focus on making data centers safer, better, less impactful to the communities that they're near.

24:23We need to put them in areas that aren't directly adjacent to where people are living as much as we're able. We need to make them less energy intensive to the extent that we are able. I personally would say like a blanket moratorium, which again, that's not exactly what this is, but is a mistake just because of how dependent the entire economy is on AI right now and how important these AI data centers continue to be for the AI race and boom. I disagree. I think the carve outs here make sense. You can still build anything up to 50 megawatts you can still build some pretty decent sized mega centers now the data center is not like huge huge but like you can get a pretty good day center and look i they're building someone's building a data center 10 miles from my house right it's going to be pretty big it's going to be right next to where the animal shelter was going to move uh it's like bad and to have watched that process it sort of happened before anybody realized it was happening and i think that's that's that's the story that's true a lot of places in this country where as a community.

25:27These deals were made a while ago, or when they do happen, you don't necessarily know until the permitting is done that this is even coming in. So I do think some sort of pause, some sort of moratorium, some sort of restrictions on here's until we sort of figure out A, a way to inform people what's going on, B, a better plan of attack for where these things go and the impact they'll have. And again, I have a dog in this fight, so I'm not saying I'm an unbiased perspective here. Well, no, I think that that's a fair point to make. I will just say like talking to a lot of industry people, it really surprises me how constrained startups feel in particular by compute.

26:07Like there is, you know, you hear about SpaceX, OpenAI, you know, these places that have a lot of access to data centers, a lot of access to computers. Everyone else is like fighting tooth the nail to get access and they need a lot more than they're currently able to get. Um, it makes me like a little less stressed about AI bubble talk. Cause I'm like, I don't know, like the, you know, if you're in Silicon Valley, at least it still just feels like the appetite is enormous. Brian, I can see you taking a big sigh. No, no, no. Well, yes, always. Um, but no, I did want to, before we move on, cause I want to make sure I asked Leah a question, which is that this is shaping up, at least to me, to be a real issue in the midterms, at least in some places.

26:54And I want to know what your sense of like, but also what's interesting about it to me too, is it doesn't seem necessarily, despite Trump's post, that clearly divided among party lines. Like, how is this going to play out? Like, it feels like an issue I don't know for who or where or how.