Geoffrey Hinton, the prominent data scientist known as the “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence,” is backing Elon Musk in his legal bid to block OpenAI from becoming a profitable company.
Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics in October, is known for his work developing artificial neural networks, the foundation for AI.
“OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organization clearly focused on security and made a number of security-related promises in its charter,” Hinton said in a statement released Monday by Encode, a youth-led advocacy group. for human-centered AI, which. promotes the use of AI to enhance human capabilities rather than replace them.
“It received numerous tax benefits and other benefits from its nonprofit status,” Hinton added. “Allowing it to destroy all of that when it becomes inappropriate sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.”
OpenAI was originally created as a non-profit research lab in 2015 by CEO Sam Altman, Musk and others.
In 2019, OpenAI aimed to act more like a startup, so it created a limited-profit model with non-profits still controlling the entire company.
But now it is looking for a more traditional for-profit structure that will enable the company “to raise the necessary capital on conventional terms like others in this space,” OpenAI said in a blog post last week.
Co-founder Musk, who cut ties with OpenAI in 2018, is seeking to block the firm’s restructuring.
On Monday, Encode said it had filed an amicus brief — a legal document that provides input into a lawsuit from a group not directly involved — in support of the lawsuit against OpenAI’s for-profit movement.
“The restructuring would fundamentally undermine OpenAI’s commitment to prioritizing public safety,” Encode wrote in a press release.
“The nonprofit structure controlled by OpenAI under which OpenAI currently operates provides essential governance safeguards that would be lost if control were transferred to a for-profit entity,” Encode added.
Hinton, who has worked at Google for more than a decade, has previously criticized OpenAI’s security measures.
During a press conference in October, Hinton said Altman is “much less concerned about safety than he is about profits,” calling the situation “unfortunate.”
Last year, after leaving Google, Hinton sounded the alarm about the potential damage Artificial Intelligence could cause to humanity, telling the New York Times that he regretted his role in developing the technology.
Meanwhile, Musk is arguing that OpenAI executives “tricked” him into co-founding the company by playing on his concerns about the dangers of AI. OpenAI said Musk wanted the company to transform into a profitable structure by 2017.
In February, he filed a lawsuit against OpenAI accusing it of breaking its non-profit commitment by partnering with Microsoft.
He withdrew the lawsuit in June but resumed in August.
Musk’s own startup, xAI, is a public benefit corporation that is a for-profit company with social and environmental goals. It’s the same structure that OpenAI is looking to create, the company said last week.
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