A lot is going on behind closed doors at OpenAI. Longtime Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati announced she is leaving the company, with two other veteran executives following her out the door. Within hours, it came out that CEO Sam Altman is working to restructure the company into a for-profit endeavor, eliminating the nonprofit arm’s control over the for-profit business.
Is the timing coincidental? Here’s what each of the exiting executives had to say:
- “I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” Murati said.
- “It is time for me to take a break. There is no better capstone to my work here than shipping o1 to the world,” Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew said.
- “Right now feels like a natural point for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI,” Vice President of Research Barret Zoph said.
Long before talks of restructuring to become a for-profit company with a nonprofit arm – instead of the other way around – ChatGPT-creator OpenAI has been accused of abandoning its nonprofit mission. Co-founder Elon Musk sued the company and Altman over it earlier this year.
Murati was asked about the accusations during a Wall Street Journal interview in March.
“Our mission is to develop artificial general intelligence and deploy it in a way that benefits humanity, and I think, up until now, and certainly our plan moving forward, is to deploy the technology in ways that benefit people and are accessible and very concretely with ChatGPT,” Murati said. “We have done that by having a free tier. That’s certainly our plan moving forward, to have ways. We make this technology easily accessible, freely available to anyone in the world, and we’ll figure out new ways to do that and bring the public along as well.”
OpenAI is certainly entering a new era. Since its founding in 2015, the AI innovator has been a nonprofit. In 2019, OpenAI added a “capped profit” arm that was still controlled by the nonprofit’s board of directors.
In November of last year, the nonprofit board fired Altman, without saying much about why beyond that they lost faith and trust in him. Within days, Microsoft had scooped up Altman and any OpenAI employees who wanted to come with. Hundreds of employees threatened to quit if the board didn’t resign. The board did resign, and Altman came back home and installed a new board of directors.
The conflict at OpenAI has long been about this tug-of-war between its core mission and commercial interests.
“We will need huge amounts of capital to complete our mission, and we have been extremely upfront about that,” Altman said weeks before his firing. “But we will need a lot more money. We don’t know exactly how much. We don’t know exactly how it’s going to be structured; what we’re gonna do. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise because we have said this all the way through. It’s just a tremendously expensive endeavor.”
Today, OpenAI is on a new fundraising round that New York Times sources say could value the company at $150 billion. It would make it the second most valuable private company behind TikTok owner ByteDance.
But Reuters sources say that valuation hinges on changing OpenAI’s corporate structure. This means the nonprofit would no longer be in control, the company would be run with a for-profit mindset, and Altman would get a stake in the company that could be worth $10.5 billion.
Investors would welcome the news of OpenAI running more like a tech startup, but for those troubled about AI safety, there are concerns about whether OpenAI can responsibly govern itself in a world that is still largely unregulated.
