A few months after publicly announcing its intention to reorganize its corporate structure, OpenAI has changed course and decided that its non-profit division will continue to control its commercial business, Entrepreneur reports, UNN writes.
Details
According to a report in OpenAI's blog, published on Monday, the company's board of directors decided that OpenAI will continue to rely on the supervision and control of its non-profit division in the future.
"OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organization, and today it is supervised and controlled by this non-profit organization," OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor wrote in a blog post. - In the future, it will continue to be supervised and controlled by this non-profit organization."
The company's commercial LLC, which has existed as a non-profit organization since 2019 and will continue to do so, will become a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). A PBC is a commercial company that must consider the public good in addition to profits in its decisions. OpenAI's non-profit division will control and become the largest shareholder of the PBC.
"Our mission remains unchanged," Taylor noted. OpenAI's mission is "to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity."
In December, OpenAI publicly stated in a blog post that it was thinking about making its commercial section a PBC, but one that would fully control OpenAI's operations and business. The non-profit side would not control the commercial side, but would instead be responsible for charitable initiatives.
Taylor wrote on Monday that OpenAI decided to change course and allow the non-profit to retain control over the commercial business after talking to community leaders and with the offices of the Delaware Attorney General and the California Attorney General.
More than 30 community leaders, former OpenAI employees and Nobel laureates sent letters to the attorneys general's offices last month asking them to stop OpenAI's attempts to break away from non-profit management.
Supplement
Recently, OpenAI has been embroiled in a lawsuit with Elon Musk, who helped found the company and left in early 2018 after a failed takeover attempt. Since then, Musk has filed lawsuits against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of violating OpenAI's founding agreement and working to maximize profits for Microsoft rather than humanity as a whole. Microsoft has invested approximately $14 billion in OpenAI.
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Musk even made an offer to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion in February, which Altman quickly rejected on social network X. At the time of publication of the original article, Musk had not yet commented on it.
Musk offers to buy OpenAI for a record $97.4 billion: what's going on11.02.25, 05:25 • [views_32099]
OpenAI started as a non-profit organization in 2015 and transitioned to a "limited profit" company in 2019, which meant that the company's profits were limited to a certain amount and the excess profits were transferred to the non-profit parent organization. The commercial division raised $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019, along with an initial round of fundraising of $100 million.
In November 2022, OpenAI launched its AI chat ChatGPT, which as of March was used by 500 million users worldwide every week, compared to 400 million in February.
OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round in March, making it the largest private technology deal ever, valuing the company at $300 billion.