An increasingly diverse coalition is forming in opposition to OpenAI’s plans to reorganize into a fully for-profit company.
On Monday, Encode, a youth-led advocacy group representing young people in dozens of countries, filed a court brief in support of Elon Musk’s ongoing lawsuit to block OpenAI’s corporate transformation. The application was supported by one of the most prominent figures in the field, Nobel Prize and Turing Award winner Jeffrey Hinton, who is often referred to as the godfather of AI.
“OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit organization with an explicit focus on safety, and we made a number of safety commitments in our charter,” Hinton said in a statement released by Encode with the brief. “The company receives a lot of tax and other benefits from its non-profit status. Allowing them to destroy all of that when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.” That will happen.”
Mr Hinton recently told the BBC that he believed there was a “10 to 20 per cent chance” that AI would lead to human extinction within the next 30 years. Previously, Hinton was more conservative, pegging the odds at just 10%.
OpenAI is currently organized as a for-profit corporation governed by a nonprofit board of directors, which imposes some limitations on its mission and ability to raise capital and compensate investors. The company formally announced its intention to reorganize as a more traditional for-profit company last week, but the change has been expected for some time and OpenAI co-founder Musk has filed a preliminary injunction blocking it. filed a federal lawsuit seeking. In November.
Encode claims that OpenAI’s planned transition from a nonprofit organization to a Delaware public benefit corporation “undermines certain safety-focused promises that nonprofit organization has made to the public.” In particular, this summary asks whether for-profit companies can make good on OpenAI’s promise to “stop competing and start supporting” organizations that share its values as they move closer to building artificial general intelligence. I am questioning whether.
“Several companies are currently competing to develop and deploy innovative AI, with the benefits being internal but the impact on all humanity being external,” said Sneha Revanur, Founder and President of Encode. said in a statement. “Courts must intervene to ensure that AI development is in the public interest.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI told the court to dismiss Musk’s lawsuit, saying he lacked standing and was trying to gain an unfair competitive advantage over his AI startup, xAI. I asked. OpenAI also released a large number of emails and other messages from Musk, including one showing that he had advocated turning the organization into a for-profit organization as early as 2017. says the company.
