I'm confused, how can a company that's gained numerous advantages from being non-profit just switch to a for-profit model? Weren't a lot of the advantages (like access to data and scraping) given with the stipulation that it's for a non-profit? This sounds like it should be illegal to my brain
the person that you’re replying to said something that’s true about the USA. they didn’t say anything about other countries.
for another example, i can say “if you’re in the USA, then the current year is 2024” and that statement will be true. it is also true in every other country (for the moment), but that’s besides the point.
And I replied that it's also true in other countries, it's not a problem only the US has. It's not besides the point. It's acting as if only the US has the problem.
And I specifically mentioned the USA because that's the country where OpenAI operates and where the events in the article take place, so if someone asks why it's so easy for OpenAI to go from being a nonprofit to a for-profit company (this was the issue I was responding to, not some general question about whether money has influence around the world), it's the laws of the USA that are relevant, not the laws of other countries.
Their non-profit status had nothing to do with the legality of their training data acquisition methods. Some of it was still legal and some of it was still illegal (torrenting a bunch of books off a piracy site).