Billionaire Elon Musk has queried whether it's legal for OpenAI — the firm behind ChatGPT — to become a for-profit business after he invested approximately $50 million into it.
On May 16, Musk spoke with CNBC during Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting and claimed he “came up with the name” OpenAI, intending for the company to be an open-source alternative to DeepMind after Google purchased the company in 2014. Musk likened OpenAI’s nonprofit to for-profit transition to a “save the Amazon” organization becoming a “lumber company” that logged and sold trees from the rainforest, adding:
“Is that legal? That doesn’t seem legal. In general, if it is legal to start a company as a non-profit and then take the IP and transfer it to a for-profit that then makes tons of money [...] shouldn't that be the default?”it began as a nonprofit company so that it was “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” and could focus on its goal of advancing “digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.
OpenAI was created as an open source , non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.
OpenAI says it began as a nonprofit company so that it was “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” and could focus on its goal of advancing “digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.”