OpenAI’s mission to “Benefit All Humanity” is at risk as funding increases

It was a gradual but perhaps inevitable change.

OpenAI announced in 2019 that it was adding a for-profit arm — to help fund its nonprofit mission — but that, true to its original spirit, the company would limit the profits investors could take home.

“We want to increase our ability to raise capital while fulfilling our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure that we know of strikes the right balance,” OpenAI said at the time. “Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid between a for-profit and non-profit company, which we call a ‘capped profit’ company.

It was a smart move that, on the surface, seemed designed to satisfy employees and stakeholders concerned about the safe development of the technology and those who wanted to see the company more aggressively produce and launch products.

But as investment poured into the profit side and the company’s notoriety — and Altman’s notoriety — grew, some grew nervous.

OpenAI’s board of directors briefly ousted Altman last year over concerns that the company was releasing products too aggressively without prioritizing safety. Employees, and especially Microsoft (with its billion-dollar investment), came to Altman’s aid. Altman returned to his position after only a few days.

But the cultural rift had been exposed.

Two of the company’s top researchers — Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever — soon resigned. The duo was in charge of the company’s so-called superalignment team, which was tasked with ensuring that the company develops general artificial intelligence safely — the core tenet of OpenAI’s mission.

OpenAI then disbanded the superalignment team entirely later that month. After the departure, Leike told X that the team “sailed against the wind”.

“OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company,” Leike wrote on X, adding that building generative AI was “an inherently dangerous endeavor” but that OpenAI was now more concerned with building “shiny products” .

It now appears that OpenAI has almost completed its transformation into a giant “move fast and break things” Big Tech-sty.

Fortune reported that Altman told employees in a meeting last week that the company plans to move away from nonprofit board control, which it has “outgrown,” within the next year.

Reuters reported on Saturday that OpenAI is now on the verge of securing another $6.5 billion in investment, which would value the company at $150 billion. But sources told Reuters the investment comes with a catch: OpenAI must waive the profit cap for investors.

That would place OpenAI ideologically far removed from its dreamy early days, when its technology was meant to be open source and for the benefit of all.

OpenAI told Business Insider in a statement that it remains focused on “building AI that benefits everyone,” while continuing to work with its nonprofit board. “The nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to be,” OpenAI said.