“OpenAI wants to change its status while retaining all of the benefits that enabled it to reach the point it has today,” Meta argues.

Meta is asking California Attorney General Rob Bonta to block OpenAI’s planned transition from a non-profit to for-profit entity.

In a letter sent to Bonta’s office this week, Meta says that OpenAI “should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and reappropriating assets it built as a charity and using them for potentially enormous private gains.”

The letter, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal and you can read in full below, goes so far as to say that Meta believes Elon Musk is “qualified and well positioned to represent the interests of Californians in this matter.” Meta supporting Musk’s fight against OpenAI is notable given that Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were talking about literally fighting in a cage match just last year.

  • Loduz_247@lemmy.worldEnglish
    65·
    23 hours ago

    Why doesn’t Meta want Open AI to be a for-profit company?

    And are there any examples of a company that started as a non-profit becoming for-profit?

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 hours ago

      It seems like besides Linux itself, most successful open source projects go for profit. When users don’t like the changes, they fork and keep going.

      Like MySQL going for profit with a sell out to Oracle and MariaDB becoming the most popular fork of MySQL.

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zipEnglish
      223·
      22 hours ago

      for profit would imply they can grow even faster due to having funds to expand its service. You would be against it if you plan on having your own competing AI service(which meta clearly does)

      • just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        Meta has also released many top tier model to the open source community. To say “meta only oppose openai cuz they wanna create a service of their own” is quite frankely uninformed.

        Meta is the reason so many researchers are able to work and make AI accessible to the everyday people. Without llama models, so much of research would not have been possible cuz openai never release their stuff under the guise of “safety”.

        Openai wants to monopolize and charge us whatever they want. And this going for-profit was part of their plan from the beginning. If only meta had not released their top tier models for absolutely free, openai would have had complete monopoly.

        Also saying for profit structure would allow them to have more fund is like saying having a gun will allow a robber to have more funds.

        The funds will come from consumers, for profit would mean they will have an easier time ripping off the people without too much scrutiny

        • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          7 hours ago

          none of this doesn’t refute anything ive said. the whole point to prevent open ai from getting profit is to prevent it from getting big to the point that the rest are worthless. anyone who has a foot in AI would not want open ai to go for profit, as that on its own is a limiter to how fast it can grow. Strictly speaking, any non-profit organization has a significantly harder time to expand than ones that are for profit.

        • Loduz_247@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          22 hours ago

          But in that case sooner or later Roko’s basilisk will achieve its goal if you try to stop it, it will punish you in the process.