Elon Musk has a new supporter in his legal fight against OpenAI: AI “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton.
“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 issued by Encode, a youth-led advocacy organization for human-centered AI, on Monday.
“It received numerous tax and other benefits from its non-profit status. Allowing it to tear all of that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem,” he added.
Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics in October. He’s known as the godfather of AI for his work in neural networks and he spent more than a decade at Google before quitting in May 2023.
OpenAI was launched as a nonprofit research organization in 2015. Hinton’s comments come as OpenAI takes steps towards becoming a for-profit company.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others but left its board in 2018, is trying to block that move. Last month, his lawyers filed an injunction against OpenAI to stop its transition to a for-profit entity. When asked about the filing, a spokesperson for OpenAI told BI Musk’s latest filing “continues to be utterly without merit.”
Encode filed an amicus brief in support of Musk’s efforts on December 27.
“From the start, OpenAI’s mission was to keep its technology under the control of a nonprofit accountable to the public,” Adam Billen, Encode’s vice president of public policy, said in a statement to Business Insider on Tuesday morning.
“Its decision to abandon that mission in favor of profit underscores why public involvement is essential in shaping the future of this transformative technology,” Billen continued.
Musk’s legal battle against OpenAI
In February, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the ChatGPT-maker of violating its nonprofit mission by partnering with Microsoft.
Musk withdrew the lawsuit in June, only to refile it in August.
Musk’s lawyers are arguing that OpenAI’s executives “deceived” Musk into co-founding the company by playing on his concerns about AI’s existential risks.
This isn’t the first time Hinton has criticized OpenAI.
At a press conference in October, Hinton said Altman is “much less concerned with safety than with profits,” and described the situation as “unfortunate.”
OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion funding round in October, valuing it at $157 billion.
OpenAI, Hinton, and Musk did not respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.
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