OpenAI as we knew it is dead
Since its founding in 2015, its leaders have said their top priority is making sure artificial intelligence is developed safely and beneficially. They’ve touted the company’s unusual corporate structure as a way of proving the purity of its motives. OpenAI was a nonprofit controlled not by its CEO or by its shareholders, but by a board with a single mission: keep humanity safe.
But this week, the news broke that OpenAI will no longer be controlled by the nonprofit board. OpenAI is turning into a full-fledged for-profit benefit corporation. Oh, and CEO Sam Altman, who had previously emphasized that he didn’t have any equity in the company, will now get equity worth billions, in addition to ultimate control over OpenAI.
In an announcement that hardly seems coincidental, chief technology officer Mira Murati said shortly before that news broke that she was leaving the company. Employees were so blindsided that many of them reportedly reacted to her abrupt departure with a “WTF” emoji in Slack.
The whole point of OpenAI was to be nonprofit and safety-first. It began sliding away from that vision years ago when, in 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit arm so it could rake in the kind of huge investments it needed from Microsoft as the costs of building advanced AI scaled up. But some of its employees and outside admirers still held out hope that the company would stick to its principles. That hope can now be put to bed.
