The following report is by Vox (excerpts):
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.
WTF indeed.
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.
“We can say goodbye to the original version of OpenAI that wanted to be unconstrained by financial obligations,” Jeffrey Wu, who joined the company in 2018 and worked on early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3, told me.
“Restructuring around a core for-profit entity formalizes what outsiders have known for some time: that OpenAI is seeking to profit in an industry that has received an enormous influx of investment in the last few years,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell’s Tech Policy Institute. The shift departs from OpenAI’s “founding emphasis on safety, transparency and an aim of not concentrating power.”
And if this week’s news is the final death knell for OpenAI’s lofty founding vision, it’s clear who killed it.
Since Altman took the helm of OpenAI in 2019, the company has been drifting from its mission. That year, the company — meaning the original nonprofit — created a for-profit subsidiary so it could pull in the huge investments needed to build cutting-edge AI. But it did something unprecedented in Silicon Valley: It capped how much profit investors could make. They could get up to 100 times what they put in, but beyond that, the money would go to the nonprofit, which would use it to benefit the public. For example, it could fund a universal basic income program to help people adjust to automation-induced joblessness.
Over the next few years, OpenAI increasingly deprioritized its focus on safety as it rushed to commercialize products. By 2023, the nonprofit board had grown so suspicious of Altman that it tried to oust him. But he quickly clawed his way back to power, exploiting his relationship with Microsoft with a new board stacked in his favor. And earlier this year, OpenAI’s safety team imploded as staffers lost faith in Altman and quit the company.
Now, Altman has taken the final step in consolidating his power: He’s stripped the board of its control entirely. Although it will still exist, it won’t have any teeth.
Profit may be what Altman feels the company desperately needs. Despite a supremely confident blog post published this week, in which he claimed that AI would help with “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics,” OpenAI is actually in a jam. It’s been struggling to find a clear route to financial success for its models, which cost hundreds of millions — if not billions — to build. Restructuring the business into a for-profit could help attract investors.
“If OpenAI were to retroactively remove profit caps from investments, this would in effect transfer billions in value from a non-profit to for-profit investors,” Jacob Hilton, a former employee of OpenAI who joined before it transitioned from a nonprofit to a capped-profit structure. “Unless the non-profit were appropriately compensated, this would be a money grab. In my view, such a thing would be incompatible with OpenAI’s charter, which states that OpenAI’s primary fiduciary duty is to humanity, and I do not understand how the law could permit it.”
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
The news comes a week after Blackrock and Microsoft teamed-up to create a massive multi-billion dollar fund for AI.
This isn’t any real surprise to me and should not be for you either. Of course, it’s always about money. Did people actually think Altman and company are people of integrity and charity?
1 Timothy 6:9 But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. [10] For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
And you can see the massive hubris this Altman loser has for people in his space:
Moreover, naturally Altman has told people that in order to compete in the job market and not be fearful that AI will take your job, his answer is just to embrace it and get good at using it.
You want to get really comfortable with these new tools because we don’t know exactly what the jobs of the future are going to look like.
I’m confident that there will be lots of jobs and also that many of them will look somewhat different today, but we never seem to run out of stuff to do.
Altman said in a taped interview with Indeed CEO Chris Hyams, shown as part of an Indeed conference in Dallas on Thursday.
But we already know that AI will replace tens of millions over the next decade. His globalist friends have already admitted as much. SEE: OpenAI Launches Project ‘Strawberry’ Model That Revolutionizes Coding, But Experts Warn This Might Be The Nail In The Coffin For Coders
International Monetary Fund Warns That 60% Of Jobs Will Be Affected By AI, Mostly Replaced
AI Is Set To Replace Multimillions Of Jobs According To New Surveys And Forecasts
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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