VALUE: After Hours (S07 E14): Intellectual Property, AI, and the S-Curve Debate

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Bill Brewster discussed Intellectual Property, AI, and the S-Curve Debate. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Jake: I did think it was a little funny about the– Oh, sorry, Toby, go ahead.

Tobias: I was just going to say, and then is it DeepSeek or is it OpenAI, like who’s ahead? That’s the– [crosstalk]

Jake: Who is wearing the daddy pants? Yeah.

Tobias: Yeah, that’s what we’re going to find out. Sorry, JT. Go.

Jake: Oh, I thought it was a little funny that people were complaining about maybe DeepSeek stealing OpenAI’s data and structure or whatever, and yet OpenAI probably stole all kinds of stuff to begin with on everyone else’s IP.

Tobias: The internet.

Jake: Yeah, the internet, basically. So, it’s all just stealing IP turtles all the way down. [laughs]

Bill: Well, it’s all about who’s stealing and are they on your side?

Jake: Oh, okay. It’s okay then.

Bill: Yeah.

Tobias: What does it mean though? Do you care that they’ve been trained on– Isn’t that what we’re all doing anyway? We go and read something, synthesize it, rewrite it new. There’s no intellectual property protection as long as you reformulate the way that you express it. If you’re using their words as they’re written down, it’s copyright. There are other ways of like you can breach some– Process patents, that’s why Amazon had that–

For 20 years, Amazon was the only place where you could one click buy. Everywhere else, you had to go through like a payment page. But now that’s gone away, so everybody can one click buy everywhere. Maybe they are stealing, but it’s not protected under any intellectual property law.

Jake: I don’t know. Literally, I’ve never had an original thought myself, so I don’t know how to answer that.

Tobias: There’s nothing new under the sun. I mean, that alone is– That’s 2,000 years old, at least.

Jake: Yeah.

Bill: Yeah. Well, this is a totally different thought. We’ve known that China was stealing IP, and we’ve all been okay with it while stocks go up and margins go up and costs go down. So, not that it’s fun once there’s real consequences, once you think that there’s a national security risk to them stealing stuff. That’s when maybe you realize that letting it go this far may not have been that smart, but–

Tobias: Maybe they leap ahead of us. The theory for Taiwan. So, they say, why would we– We heard this theory while were there. They say, “Why would we invade Taiwan when in 30 years-time or less? Taiwan will want to join us, because we have the best standard of living in the world.”

Jake: Yeah. Poll instead of push kind of–

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