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Sam Altman founded OpenAI in 2015 with the lofty mission of developing artificial general intelligence that would “benefit all of humanity.”
He chose to become a nonprofit to support that mission.
But as the company moves closer to developing artificial general intelligence — a still-largely theoretical AI that can reason like humans do — and money flows in from excited investors, some worry that Mr. Altman is losing sight of the “benefiting all of humanity” part of his goal.
It was a gradual, but perhaps inevitable, change.
OpenAI announced in 2019 that it would add a for-profit arm to fund its non-profit mission, but true to its original spirit, it would limit the profits that investors could take home.
“We want to grow our fundraising capacity while still delivering on our mission, and as far as we know, existing legal structures do not strike the right balance,” OpenAI said at the time. “Our solution is to establish OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and non-profit company, which we call a ‘capped profit’ company.”
It was a shrewd move that, on the surface, seemed intended to satisfy employees and stakeholders concerned about developing the technology safely, as well as those who wanted the company to be more aggressive in producing and releasing products.
But as investment flowed into the for-profit company and its reputation — and Altman’s — grew, some grew uneasy.
OpenAI’s board of directors briefly removed Altman last year amid concerns that the company was releasing products too aggressively without prioritizing safety. Employees, particularly Microsoft, which has billions of dollars invested in the company, rescued Altman, who returned to his job just a few days later.
However, cultural rifts have become apparent.
Two of the company’s top researchers, Jan Reijke and Ilya Sutskever, who led the company’s so-called Superalignment team and were central to OpenAI’s mission to enable the company to safely develop artificial general intelligence, resigned shortly after.
OpenAI subsequently disbanded its entire SuperAlignment team later that month. After leaving the team, Reicke told X that the team was “sailing against headwinds.”
“OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company,” Reicke wrote to X, adding that building generative AI is an “inherently risky endeavor,” but that OpenAI is currently interested in building a “flashy product.”
OpenAI appears to be nearing the end of its transformation into a Big Tech-style “move fast and break things” behemoth.
Fortune magazine reported that Altman told a staff meeting last week that he plans to move away from board control of the “outgrowing” nonprofit over the next 12 months.
Reuters reported on Saturday that OpenAI is now on the verge of securing another $6.5 billion in investment, which would bring the company’s valuation to $150 billion. But sources told Reuters the investment comes with a condition: OpenAI must remove the profit cap for investors.
That would move OpenAI ideologically away from its dreamy early days, when the technology was open source and intended to benefit everyone.
In a statement to Business Insider, OpenAI said it remains committed to “building AI that benefits everyone” and is working with the nonprofit’s board of directors. “The nonprofit is core to our mission and will remain so,” OpenAI said.