To Further Its Mission of Benefitting Everyone, OpenAI Will Become Fully for-Profit

The thing you need to know about OpenAI, according to OpenAI, is that its only goal is to solve “the most important challenge of our time” in order to benefit all of humanity and the whole world.

That will continue to be the case, the organization said in an announcement on Friday, even as it restructures itself from a corporation controlled by a nonprofit to a stand-alone corporation that happens to throw a lot of money at an affiliated nonprofit.

How does this restructuring help OpenAI fulfill its mission of benefiting all humans and things non-human? Well, it’s simple. OpenAI’s “current structure does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who would finance the mission.” Under the new structure, OpenAI’s leadership will finally be able to raise more money and pay attention to the needs of the billionaires and trillion-dollar tech firms that invest in it. Voila, everyone benefits.

Not mentioned in the press release is the fact that a year ago the non-profit board that oversaw OpenAI unsuccessfully tried to give CEO Sam Altman the boot for “outright lying” in ways that, according to former board member Helen Toner, made it difficult for the board to ensure that the company’s “public good mission was primary, was coming first—over profits, investor interests, and other things,”

With its new structure, OpenAI wants to maintain at least a facade of altruism. The for-profit company will be incorporated as a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, which means that its board can consider how the company’s actions impact stakeholders like employees and customers in addition to its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders (Corporate law experts have pointed out that normal corporations are also perfectly free to do this).

Other publicly traded Delaware Public Benefit Corporations include Laureate Education, which operates a string of for-profit universities around the world, including one that was accused multiple times of misleading students about the cost of its degree programs (Laureate sold Walden University prior to the university settling a class action lawsuit earlier this year for $28.5 million). Another is Lemonade Inc., an insurance company that once advertised, and quickly apologized for, an AI feature it claimed could detect fraudulent customers by analyzing their faces.

Mixed in with all the effective accelerationist saviorism in OpenAI’s announcement, is the clear message that the new company plans to raise a ton more money to further its drive toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). According to reporting from The Information, OpenAI and Microsoft have defined AGI as systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. You know, the hallmark of intelligence.

What will become of the nonprofit that currently oversees the company is less clear, although it certainly won’t be pinching pennies. It wasn’t a very traditional nonprofit to begin with, having quickly churned through $137 million in donated cash from Elon Musk and other tech moguls in addition to more than $100 million in free computing from Google, Microsoft, and others in order to create generative AI systems that now benefit for-profit corporations.

After the corporate transition is complete, the nonprofit won’t have any oversight duties at OpenAI but it will receive shares in the new for-profit company and be “one of the best-resourced non-profits in history,” according to OpenAI’s press release. That will allow it to “pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science.”

Needless to say, it won’t be long before we all start benefitting from its charity.