Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton backs Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI's for-profit shift; says ‘....sends a very bad message…’

Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, has joined the growing opposition against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI’s plan to become a fully for-profit company. On Monday i.e. December 30, Encode, a youth-led advocacy group representing young people worldwide, filed a legal brief in support of Elon Musk’s lawsuit aimed at stopping OpenAI’s restructuring. Hinton, a Nobel and Turing Award-winning researcher, supported the filing, voicing concerns over the direction OpenAI is taking.
Hinton criticized OpenAI for moving away from its original safety-focused nonprofit mission. In a statement released with Encode’s brief, he said, “OpenAI was founded as an explicitly safety-focused nonprofit and made a variety of safety-related promises in its charter. It received numerous tax and other benefits from its nonprofit status. Allowing it to tear all of that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.”

Hinton has also warned of the risks posed by artificial intelligence, In an recent interview with BBC, he said that there is a “10 to 20 percent” chance AI could lead to human extinction within the next 30 years. This marks a shift from his earlier estimate of 10 percent.

OpenAI started as a nonprofit organisation in 2015 to develop AI in a way that would benefit humanity, without the need to generate financial return. It is currently a for-profit company controlled by a nonprofit board. This setup limits its ability to raise funds and pay investors.
Last week, the company announced plans to fully transition to a traditional for-profit company, a move that Musk, one of OpenAI’s cofounders, has been trying to block through a lawsuit he filed in November.
OpenAI has rejected Musk’s lawsuit, arguing that he lacks the legal standing to challenge the decision and is instead seeking an unfair advantage for his own AI company, xAI. In response, OpenAI released emails and messages from Musk, some of which reportedly show that he supported the idea of transitioning OpenAI to a for-profit model as early as 2017.