Will the real OpenAI please stand up?

“This is not an OpenAI event,” Taya Christensen, a member of the communications team at OpenAI, told Gazetteer SF in an email.

Neither is it the doing of our resident prankster and local media puppetmaster Riley Walz (as far as we can trust him). He said he hadn’t heard of the fake OpenAI event until he scanned the flyers himself. Danielle Egan, another member of Walz’s mischievous friend group known for setting stunty traps for the local media and clout-chasing techies to fall into, said the same.

It’s tech week in San Francisco, which means every company worth its funding is trying to break through the noise of networking events, panels, and launches by going viral with some marketing stunt. Obviously, the fake “hardware launch” flyers are trying to capitalize on the public interest around some recent, real OpenAI news: At a developer conference at the Moscone Center on Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and ex-Apple designer and now-OpenAI collaborator Jony Ive teased a “family of devices” coming soon.

However, posing as OpenAI seems to have backfired. About two hours after OpenAI responded to our inquiry, the event and “Team” account was suspended on Luma. The flyers are still up, but the event is likely off.