AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman answered questions on how AI information that has been trained over the years has come from the web—and some of it's the open web. Still, other material was being lifted from YouTube videos.

Suleyman was asked to justify who would get to own the IP, who is supposed to get value from the IP, and whether, to put it bluntly, whether the AI companies have effectively stolen the world's IP.

Suleyman said that if such material is on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate it, or reproduce it. That has been freeware if you like. That's been the understanding.

"There's a separate category where a website, publisher, or news organisation has explicitly said, 'Do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a grey area, and I think that's going to work its way through the courts."

Suleyman said that some people have taken that information and that is going to get litigated – rightly so.

"You know, look, the economics of information are about to change radically, because we're going to reduce the cost of production of knowledge to zero marginal cost. And this is just a very difficult thing for people to intuit — but in 15 or 20 years, we will produce new scientific and cultural knowledge at almost zero marginal cost. It will be widely open-sourced and available to everybody. And I think that is going to be, you know, a true inflexion point in the history of our species. Because what are we, collectively, as an organism of humans, other than an intellectual production engine? We produce knowledge. Our science makes us better. And so what we really want in the world, in my opinion, are new engines that can turbocharge discovery and invention."