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JoyIn dates its alien-visitor framing three weeks before OpenAI's essay
JoyIn, a 20-person robotics team in Suzhou with Ant Group backing, says OpenAI distilled its research framing and copied its launch page. The startup is going to court over the two assets any rival could rebuild.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Guo Renjie, chief executive of the Chinese robotics startup JoyIn, set out claims that OpenAI copied its ideas and its website in an open letter in Chinese on the company's WeChat account, dated 10 September.
- JoyIn announced Aether, a model for controlling humanoid robots, the same day, and the letter says the company brought the release forward in response to OpenAI.
- The letter names particle effects as the core idea of the design it says was taken, and describes OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra page as "pixel-level" copying, in TNW's translation.
- JoyIn's legal team has "fully launched" proceedings, according to the letter, and CNBC reported that the company has begun the process of filing a lawsuit.
- CNBC, which reported the letter, said it could not independently verify the claims, and OpenAI did not immediately respond to its request for comment.
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Why it matters
- constraint The two things JoyIn can point at are the two any competitor can rebuild from a public page, so even a favourable ruling would restore very little of whatever lead JoyIn had.
- exposure By arguing its case in public, JoyIn has put its own performance claims in front of buyers while its letter remains the only source for them; TNW has not verified the figures.
- precedent An Ant Group-backed startup taking a public swing at OpenAI over positioning gives other small labs a cheaper template than discovery: publish the dated letter, then ship.
Guo's case on the ideas rests on 21 days. He says JoyIn presented its "extraterrestrial visitor" framework in Silicon Valley on 16 August [5]. Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist, published an essay titled "An Alien Mind" on 6 September [6], three weeks later [1], and Guo points to similarities on recursive self-improvement and on using AI to optimise computing power [7].
The design comparison is thinner than the letter's language. OpenAI launched Astra on 3 September [8], and JoyIn says its own site went live at the end of July, which the account describes as more than two months earlier [9]. Counting from the last day of July, the gap is about five weeks [2].
CNBC noted that some of the concepts Guo cites are existing parts of AI research, and linked to "When AI builds itself", an essay on recursive self-improvement by Marina Favaro and Jack Clark of the Anthropic Institute that Forbes wrote about on 7 June [18]. Pachocki's essay traces OpenAI's reasoning work to mid-2023, when a project called "RLSlow" produced the first results [17].
"People often say major tech companies have intelligence networks monitoring the whole internet, this time I believe it, this is a direct distillation of us without any modifications," Guo wrote, in CNBC's translation [11]. Pachocki uses the same word. Explaining why OpenAI hides its models' chain of thought, he wrote: "A secondary reason for this design was preventing distillation." [16] On the substance Guo names, Pachocki wrote: "Machine recursive self-improvement (RSI) will be at the very core of future scientific discovery." [15]
JoyIn sums Aether up with three numbers: 200 hours of video of humans, no data from real robots, and 4bn parameters [19]. It claims a success rate above 90% at the first attempt without task-specific training, and says the model runs on robots from Unitree and AgiBot [20]. Zhu Mingxuan, who left the US humanoid maker Figure last year, led the model's development and told CNBC that Aether cut training time by two-thirds [22]. She said JoyIn plans to open-source some parts of the model, such as touch, but not the parts related to energy [23].
A founder with a team of 20 assembled in March [24] has two piles to sort a grievance into. In the first go the assets a stranger can rebuild after loading your homepage or sitting in your August talk. In the second go the assets that need your video and your weights. JoyIn's letter is mostly about the first pile. The question a buyer can settle sits in the second: whether a 4bn-parameter checkpoint drives the Unitree or AgiBot robot already on the floor [20].
What to watch
- Whether JoyIn files in a named court, and where: the letter says proceedings are launched, CNBC says filing has begun.
- Whether OpenAI answers the three questions or CNBC's request for comment.
- Whether JoyIn releases the touch components it says it will open-source, giving outsiders a way to test the 90% figure.