OpenAI owes its copyright woes to Silicon Valley's famous mantra: 'Move fast and break things'

• OpenAI is fighting legal battles over copyright infringement.
• The New York Times, Authors Guild, and others accuse OpenAI of illegally using their content.
• OpenAI has suggested its approach is the only way to build high-quality AI models.

OpenAI, like many tech giants before it, leaned heavily into Silicon Valley's famous old mantra when building ChatGPT.

"Move fast and break things" was a strategy that underpinned the exponential growth of the likes of Uber, Airbnb, and Facebook. It enabled companies to get their rule-bending products out in the wild and then deal with the consequences afterward.

It appears that this very strategy has landed OpenAI into a mess of legal battles with content creators who accuse it of unlawfully using their content to train its generative AI models.