The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence supports Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI

An increasingly diverse coalition is forming in opposition to OpenAI’s plan to restructure itself into a completely for-profit company.

On Monday, Encode, a youth-led advocacy organization that represents young people in dozens of countries, filed an amicus brief in support of Elon Musk’s ongoing lawsuit to stop OpenAI’s transformation. The submission was supported by one of the biggest names in the field, Nobel Prize and Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton, often called the godfather of artificial intelligence.

“OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organization with a clear focus on safety and has made a variety of safety-related promises in its charter,” Hinton said in a statement released by Encode along with its brief. “It gets many tax and other benefits from its nonprofit status. Allowing it to rip all that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other players in the ecosystem.”

Hinton He recently told the BBC He believes there is a 10% to 20% chance that AI will lead to human extinction within the next 30 years. Previously, Hinton had been more modest, putting the odds at just 10 percent.

OpenAI is currently organized as a for-profit company controlled by a nonprofit board of directors, which places some limits on its mission and ability to raise money and compensate investors. Company Officially announced Its intention to restructure itself as a more traditional for-profit company last week, although the change had been expected for some time, and Musk, who was one of the founders of OpenAI, announced He filed his federal lawsuit to seek a preliminary injunction to stop it in November.

Encode argues that OpenAI’s planned transformation from a nonprofit to a public benefit corporation in Delaware would “undermine specific safety-focused commitments the nonprofit has made to the public.” In particular, the brief asks whether any for-profit company can deliver on OpenAI’s promise that it “will stop competing with and start helping any value-aligned organization that seems close to building artificial general intelligence before it does.”

“Today, a handful of companies are racing to develop and deploy transformative AI, capturing the profits but highlighting the consequences for all of humanity,” Sneha Revanur, president and founder of Incode, said in a statement. “The courts must intervene to ensure that the development of artificial intelligence is in the public interest.”

For its part, OpenAI has done just that urged the court He dismissed Musk’s lawsuit, arguing that he lacks standing and is seeking an unfair competitive advantage for his artificial intelligence startup, xAI. OpenAI also released a A large collection of emails And other messages from Musk, including several that the company said showed Musk calling for turning the organization into a for-profit enterprise as early as 2017.