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.
Being nonprofit also doesn’t prevent you from doing commercial activities.
But i think the idea would be if they are forced to be nonprofit and their code open-sourced then there is now transparency in how their LLMs are trained and operate.
But it’s a bit silly to try to make AI companies nonprofits to begin with since they could just go to another country with better laws if they are punished too heavily in one country.