Geoffrey Hinton backs Elon Musk’s legal battle against OpenAI
Geoffrey Hinton, the prominent data scientist known as the “Godfather of artificial intelligence,” is backing Elon Musk in his legal attempt to block OpenAI from switching to a for-profit 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 an explicitly safety-focused non-profit and made a variety of safety related promises in its charter,” Hinton said in a statement published on Monday by Encode, a youth-led advocacy group for human-centered AI, which promotes using AI to improve human abilities instead of replacing them.
“It received numerous tax and other benefits from its non-profit status,” Hinton added. “Allowing it to tear all of that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.”
OpenAI was initially created as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 by chief executive Sam Altman, Musk and others.
In 2019, OpenAI aimed to act more like a startup, so it created a capped-profit model with the nonprofit still controlling the whole company.
But now it is seeking out a more traditional for-profit structure that will enable the company “to raise the necessary capital with 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 structure switch.
On Monday, Encode said it had filed an amicus brief – a legal document providing input on a court case from a group that is not directly involved – in support of the lawsuit against OpenAI’s for-profit move.
“The restructuring would fundamentally undermine OpenAI’s commitment to prioritize public safety,” Encode wrote in a press release.
“The nonprofit-controlled structure that OpenAI currently operates under provides essential governance guardrails that would be forfeited if control were transferred to a for-profit entity,” Encode added.
Hinton, who worked at Google for more than a decade, has criticized OpenAI’s safety measures before.
During a press conference in October, Hinton said Altman is “much less concerned with safety than with profits,” calling the situation “unfortunate”.
Last year, after leaving Google, Hinton sounded the alarms on the potential damage AI could wreak on humanity, telling The New York Times he regretted his role in developing the technology.
Musk, meanwhile, is arguing that OpenAI executives “deceived” him into co-founding the company by playing into his concerns about the risks of AI. OpenAI said that Musk wanted the company to transform into a for-profit structure back in 2017.
In February, he filed a lawsuit against OpenAI accusing it of breaking its nonprofit commitment 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, which is a for-profit company with social and environmental goals. It’s the same structure OpenAI is looking to create, the company said last week.
