Renowned data scientist Jeffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence,” supports Elon Musk's legal efforts to prevent OpenAI from becoming a commercial company.
Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics in October, is known for developing artificial neural networks, which are the basis of AI.
“OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit organization with a clear focus on safety and has made a number of safety promises in its charter,” Hinton said in a statement Monday. by encodingis a youth-led group that advocates for human-centered AI, promoting the use of AI to enhance human capabilities rather than replace them.
“We receive many tax and other benefits because of our nonprofit status,” Hinton added. “Allowing them to destroy all of them when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.”
OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit research institute in 2015 by CEO Sam Altman, Musk and others.
In 2019, OpenAI aimed to act more like a startup, creating a profit-restricted model where nonprofits continue to control the entire company.
But the company is now exploring a more traditional for-profit structure that would allow it to “raise the necessary capital on traditional terms similar to others in the space,” OpenAI said in a blog post last week.
Co-founder Musk, who severed ties with OpenAI in 2018, is trying to block the company's restructuring.
Encode announced Monday that it has filed amicus briefs (legal documents that provide opinions on the lawsuit from entities not directly involved) in support of its lawsuit against OpenAI's for-profit efforts.
“Restructuring fundamentally undermines OpenAI's commitment to prioritizing public safety,” Encode said in a press release.
“The nonprofit management structure that OpenAI currently operates provides important governance guardrails that would be lost if control were transferred to a for-profit organization,” Encord added.
Hinton, who worked at Google for more than a decade, has previously criticized OpenAI's security measures.
Hinton said at a news conference in October that Altman was “far more focused on safety than profits” and called the situation “unfortunate.”
After leaving Google last year, Hinton sounded the alarm about the damage AI could do to humanity. speak to the new york times He regretted his role in technological development.
Meanwhile, Musk claims that OpenAI executives used his concerns about the risks of AI to “trick” him into co-founding the company. OpenAI said: Musk wanted to transform the company. It became a for-profit organization in 2017.
He filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in February, alleging that the company broke its nonprofit promise by partnering with Microsoft.
He withdrew the lawsuit in June, but refiled it in August.
Musk's own startup, xAI, is a public benefit corporation and a for-profit company with social and environmental goals. This is the same structure that OpenAI is building, the company announced last week.
