[area51org]

One fundamental difference: Wikipedia is not a for-profit corporation. OpenAI is. That probably matters.

[txrx0000]

Yeah, it does matter, though the issue is not exactly just monetary profit. The fundamental problem is OpenAI has made the GPT model weights artificially scarce. But at the same time they claim that other artificially scarce information such as books should not be scarce and instead belong to the intellectual commons. The latter part which I agree with, but they took from the commons and are claiming what they took as exclusively their own. That is just evil.

There would be no problem if they open-sourced everything including the model weights. That was their original mission which they have abandoned.

[o11c]

Another fundamental difference: OpenAI explicitly markets their tool as a replacement for the copyrighted material it was trained on. This is most explicit for image generation, but applies to text as well.

As a reminder, the 4 factors of "fair use" in the United States:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

2. the nature of the copyrighted work;

3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

[mmooss]

I've never heard that non-profits can violate intellectual property laws. Otherwise, that might give advantages to Sci-hub, shadow libraries, etc.

[hxtk]

The "Fair Use" doctrine has four major pillars that a sibling comment enumerated and you can officially find here: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

One of them is the purpose or character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.

[charcircuit]

OpenAI is a nonprofit.

[CGamesPlay]

Non-profit OpenAI ("OpenAI Foundation") holds a 26% interest in for-profit OpenAI ("OpenAI Group PBC").

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft...

[nightshift1]

not since oct28

[throwaway-0001]

Non for profit does not equal to no salaries for executives- they still have highly inflated salaries.

Non for profit just means there is no dividends to owners but they can very well get huge salaries. So actually non for profit is a very bad name.

Should be called non dividend company.

[cwillu]

It should be called exactly what it is called, because that is the correct term for benefits accrued to an owner.