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.
don’t just block them. force all AI companies that use online content for research to move to a nonprofit and require them to provide their source code openly.
tax payer dollars paid to create that content so that means that AI is tax payer bought.
don’t like it? train your models on a closed network that’s behind a paywall.
Dont limit this to AI companies. All social media companies should be forced to become nonprofits and their code AGPL’d
But the AGPL does not prevent you from doing commercial activities
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.
People gotta eat. There’s nothing wrong with selling open source software
The most important part is that the people and the government can see how the suggestion and feed algorithms are written, so they they can make them change them if they’re found to lead to increased harm, such as suicides.
That’s beyond stupid.
If you don’t want bots scraping your content, then don’t put it up on the public internet.
I think you’re misunderstanding the origin of the Internet.
I was there, I know what made the Internet amazing before it was sold out for corporate interests.
It was inspired by another technology that was, in many ways, the Internet of the early 20th century. I’m referring to HAM radio.
HAM radio is fun because of the strict regulations operators need to follow and the communities that are fostered in those regulations.
the early Internet was not only built by those same people, but had fostered the same kind of spirit behind HAM. corporate interests broke the dam on a lack of regulation and have been flooding the web for decades since.
if we want to return to any semblance of what the Internet supported at the turn of the century, we must increase regulations that prohibit the abuse and theft of online intellectual property.
If a company can be considered a person, then I see no reason why each of my online contributions can’t be one as well. and as such no reason why each of those contributions can’t be afforded the same protections of personhood giants like UHC, Amazon, OpenAI can benefit from.
Do artists not deserve the right to decide who profits from their art, even if it’s posted to the internet? Would it be ethical for me to sell posters of artwork I did not create without the artists permission?
Do artists not deserve the right to decide who profits from their art, even if it’s posted to the internet?
No, I don’t think they deserve that “right.”
Would it be ethical for me to sell posters of artwork I did not create without the artists permission?
Ethics vary from person to person and change with the times. I think it would be ethical because I do not support the ownership of ideas.
This is one of the funnier things I see frequently on here. People both champion free and open source code and data that can be used for anything… until it is used for anything they even mildly dislike.
it’s disturbing how many people blindly agree with you.
free and open does not mean open menu to make money from.
I shared this comment on Lemmy with the full intention to allow the community to benefit from it, not for a company with an inflated valuation of $1.2B to steal, bottle, and sell to the world.
Maybe that’s what you believe, but allowing commercial use has been a core tenant of free and open source software
no it hasn’t. the first instance of open source anything was a major manufacturer(Ford) strong arming the patent office into forcing a patent holder to give up the rights to his patent effectively making it worthless.
only then to create a shell company (Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association) that would then hold the rights to the patent and share it with all motor vehicle manufacturers.
it was all a grift to get the patent away from the original holder so that Ford would directly benefit from it because they didn’t have an engineering team capable enough to design an engine that didn’t infringe upon the original patent.
because of this we have had zero to no true innovation on engine designs outside of a racetrack (which also directly benefits the manufacturer).
so don’t go spouting that FOSS has always been about being an equalizing factor to intellectual property rights, because if anything it’s the exact opposite.
OpenAI was a nonprofit?!?
It’s a bit more complicated than that.
I think there’s a for-profit part of the business and a non-profit part.
The non-profit part used to own the for profit with a majority stake afaik
Meta sucks, but here they are very right
Meta sucks, but here they are very
righthypocritical*Don’t worry fam I got you
Meta sucks, but here they are very
righthypocriticalimmoral*Don’t worry fam I got you
Meta is just trying to protect their intellectual property, meaning everything anyone has created on any of their platforms.
Yep, they own all of it, including every single comment anyone has written on Whatsapp.
they’re also making their own ai and don’t want openai to keep being better
Ironic they are demanding government regulation / interdiction.
Big corp loves regulation of its competition most of all.
They love small government and maximum Freedom until they want the government to restrict somebody’s freedom.
I’ve remembered Babylon 5 season 4 today. Specifically the part where the “good” Vorlons and the “bad” Shadows started erasing the shit out of worlds inhabited by lesser races who made the wrong choice of having traces of the opposing side.
Point being, you are being sarcastic about Republicans and rightfully so, but Clinton administration is the one that introduced mass surveillance in the USA, and now in Syria CNN praises HTS (Sunni jihadis) and Fox News highlight SDF (secular socialists). Though from what I’ve read, apparently they really honestly talk to each other, which is a surprising kind of coexistence, HTS leader’s words I took with scepticism, but SDF leaders too say they have no problem with HTS. HTS is a mix of ex-al-Qaeda and ex-ISIS, that’s how strange this is.
OK, politics again.
On the subject - I think turning a non-profit into for-profit while not letting go of datasets and such, legally allowed to be assembled in the context of it being non-profit, is kinda theft. So Facebook is right here. Circumstantially of course.
Hadn’t considered the ethics of transferring data acquired as a non-profit. It’s an interesting moral question - although I doubt this is Meta’s motivation (which is simply to tamp down competition).
Well, for me it’s the obvious first question. I guess I’m conditioned by, well, living in Russia, where something like this has led to the current regrettable situation.
Not sure which regrettable situation you’re talking about there, but as an outsider Russia’s current state seems like the product of a century of diverse developments.
I think America’s current state is a combination of the public getting more stupid and the oligarchy taking advantage of it and encouraging it. I attribute the stupidity increase to entertainment addiction, starting small with radio and progressing through television and computers to the internet. Lots of people can’t even even take a shit now without their little plastic rectangle to stare at.
Fuck Meta. Fuck OpenAI.
And, I’d like to add, fuck Musk.
Fuck Musk, from Chanel
Isn’t it enough that we have Fight Fight Fight?!?
But maybe they can fuck each other a bit?
“Let them
fightfuck”Love it when I can upvote an entire comment chain.
Just cos meta supports it doesnt mean its bad. The enemy of my enemy etc etc
And they make a valid point. Imagine if all startups started as non profit, raised their assets with tax reduction, and then decided to go for profit when it suited them? That’s tax evasion.
Thats a great idea u mind if i steal it?
pretty sure enemy of my enemy is still my enemy
The enemy of my enemy is a useful temporary ally.
it’s like two bears fighting for the right to eat me alive 🥲
Yeah I mean zuck and musk don’t want it because it removes an extra hoop that OpenAI has to jump through to compete, but all said and done fuck all three of them for taking another leap in human achievement and making it a “profit for investors at any cost.” And fuck OpenAI especially for pretending that wasn’t the case all along
And fuck OpenAI especially for pretending that wasn’t the case all along
I’m not sure they were ever pretending. I saw another Lemmy post about the Musk-OpenAI email exchanges from 8 years ago.
They seemed very open that the long term plan was to become a for profit company. They said they weren’t ready yet and rejected Elon’s demand to make him majority owner and merge with Tesla.
Elon’s biggest enemy is his own ego and wanting to be relevant
Open AI got a taste of that Microsoft money and everything changed. Well Sam changed course which had a lot to do with the fact that he was fired for 3 days. I do believe in the beginning they fully intended to be non profit and open.
They always planned to be for profit. It wasn’t a taste of MS money, it was the plan to sell out from the beginning. Musk got mad because they didn’t sell out to him for pennies.
"OpenAI wrote in the blog that the company and Musk both agreed that a for-profit was the next step for the startup in the fall of 2017. But when Musk failed to win majority equity, OpenAI accused him of walking away and saying the company would “fail.” "
90% of Facebook content is AI generated content now. I cant even see what my friends are doing anymore. Makes me want to just delete it. But, I do occasionally see stuff from family and friends, which is the only reason I keep it. Some people I only stay in touch with through Facebook. But seriously, fuck that company.
Hey, you left reddit, didn’t you? Do you miss that?
Here’s a thought. Leave Facebook and spend more time with family and friends wether it be in person, on the phone or over text. You’ll feel better for doing it and your family will be happy to hear from you. Deleted mine close to 10 years ago and have never had a desire to go back.
I have yet to receive a single chat message that was AI generated. Being able to connect to old college buddies that I otherwise would loose contact with is literally the only use case for Facebook
Im talking about the content on your feed, not messages.
Sure, but my point is that nobody posts anything on Facebook anymore. Its just bots and, well, maybe grandmas.
Facebook today is essentially just an address book to check in on old friends when you’ve lost their contact info
You won’t miss it, you think you will but you honestly won’t.
Getting rid of Facebook was easily one of the best things I’ve done. The people that are important will find other ways to reach out.
It reminds me of Facebook friends who are worthless
Pull the plug, you won’t look back.
Start a text group chat.
After much debate, we did … On WhatsApp :/
I have only used groups to ask questions. Do people still do that, go browse the Facebook feed? I thought that’s a grandma thing
I got a Facebook again about 6 months ago so I could post our wedding photos for our friends. Before that I hadn’t had a Facebook in like 5 years.
Probably the only time this year I’ll agree with Zuckerborg.
He’s sucking upto Musk lol
let them fight
oh yeah, the “free” market
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?
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.
Not true, many big open source projects stay open.
A good example… PyTorch. Which Meta funds.
They’re all racing to build super intelligent AI. The first one to get there could essentially become God. So zelon and mark are desperately trying to buy time.
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)
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
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.
Why do you compare OpenAI to a thief?
I’m asking out of curiosity
where does the ai training material come from?
the internet
yes, but did openai ask permission to use it? who owns it?
This is short term view. In the longterm being for profit is a major detriment
Also, he does not want to be a Roko basilisk snack
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.
