Then why did they ask her two days prior launch? A potential jury would be very, very curious knowing that.

A very simple answer is that they also wanted SJ as a voice. That doesn't mean the original voice was trying to copy SJ.

They had a voice, the natural comparison watching the interaction is to Her, and they there is likely still time to get actually SJs voice before a public rollout.

If you believe a known conman like Sam Altman didn't intend to steal SJ's voice I have a bridge to sell you.

See my comment from yesterday re him being a known conman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40435120

I find this whole thing very confusing because I never thought the voices sounded identical or very similar. I was initially even more confused about this whole thing because I thought I couldn't find clips of the SJ AI voice only to realize I had but it didn't sound like her.

This opinion is independent of Sam being a conman, scammer, creepy Worldcoin weirdo, and so on.

It’s not about what you believe but rather what you can prove

In particular, I'm pretty sure you can bake a voice model well enough for a canned demo in two days given we have cloning algs which will do it with 15 seconds of samples.

Production ready? Probably not, but demos don't have to be.