Ever wondered what happens when a company trying to build a ‘brain for the world’ needs to grow up, fast, without selling its soul? Well, OpenAI has just given us a peek as it pledges to keep its nonprofit core amid broader restructuring.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has laid out their roadmap, and the headline news is: they’re rejigging the money side of things, but their core mission to make Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) work for all of us remains bolted down.
In a letter, Altman wrote: “OpenAI is not a normal company and never will be.” It’s a bold statement, but it sets the scene for a company wrestling with how to fund world-changing tech while keeping its ethical compass pointing true north.
Cast your mind back, if you will, to OpenAI’s early days. Altman paints a picture that’s a far cry from the tech behemoth it’s becoming.
“When we started OpenAI, we did not have a detailed sense for how we were going to accomplish our mission,” he shared. “We started out staring at each other around a kitchen table, wondering what research we should do.”
Forget fancy business models or product roadmaps back then. The idea of AI dishing out medical advice, revolutionising how we learn, or needing the kind of computing power that makes your gaming PC look like a pocket calculator – “hundreds of billions of dollars of compute,” as Altman puts it – wasn’t even on the horizon.
Even the ‘how’ of building AGI was a bit of a head-scratcher. When OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, some of the early thinkers at the company apparently thought AI should probably only be trusted to a handful of “trusted people” who could “handle it.”
That view has done a complete 180. “We now see a way for AGI to directly empower everyone as the most capable tool in human history,” Altman declared.
The big dream? If everyone gets their hands on AGI, we’ll cook up amazing things for each other, pushing society forward. Sure, some might use it for dodgy stuff, but Altman’s betting on humanity: “We trust humanity and think the good will outweigh the bad by orders of magnitude.”
Their game plan is what they call “democratic AI.” They want to give us all these incredible tools. They’re even talking about open-sourcing powerful models, saying they want us to make decisions about how ChatGPT behaves.
“We want to build a brain for the world and make it super easy for people to use for whatever they want (subject to few restrictions; freedom shouldn’t impinge on other people’s freedom, for example),” Altman explained.
And people are already getting stuck in. Scientists are crunching data faster, programmers are coding smarter, and folks are even using ChatGPT to navigate tricky health issues or get advice on tough personal situations. Here’s the rub: the world wants way more AI than they can currently churn out.
“We currently cannot supply nearly as much AI as the world wants,” Altman admitted.
This insatiable appetite for AI, and the eye-watering sums of cash needed to feed it, is why OpenAI feels it’s time for it to “evolve” beyond a strict nonprofit structure.
Altman boiled the restructuring down to three main goals:
- Getting the dough: They need to find a way to pull in the “hundreds of billions of dollars and may eventually require trillions of dollars” – yes, trillions with a ‘T’ – to make their AI tools available to everyone on the planet. Think of it like building a global superhighway for intelligence.
- Supercharging the nonprofit: They want their original nonprofit arm to be the “largest and most effective nonprofit in history,” using AI to make a massive positive difference in people’s lives.
- Delivering AGI that’s helpful and safe: This means doubling down on safety and making sure AI aligns with human values. Altman’s proud of OpenAI’s track record, including creating new “red teaming” methods (where they get clever people to try and break their AI to find flaws) and being open about how their models work.
So, what’s the grand plan for this evolution? Crucially, the nonprofit side of OpenAI is staying firmly in the driver’s seat. This isn’t just some vague promise; it came after serious chats with “civic leaders” and the offices of the Attorneys General of California and Delaware.
“OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, is today a nonprofit that oversees and controls the for-profit, and going forward will remain a nonprofit that oversees and controls the for-profit. That will not change,” Altman stated.
The bit that is changing is the for-profit LLC that currently sits under the nonprofit. This will morph into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
If you’re scratching your head, a PBC is a type of company that’s legally bound to consider its public benefit mission alongside making money. Think of companies like Patagonia or some ethical food brands – they want to do good while still being a business. It’s a model other AGI labs like Anthropic are using too, so it’s becoming a bit of a trend for purpose-driven tech firms.
This also means they’re ditching their old, rather head-scratching “capped-profit” system. Altman explained this made sense when it looked like one company might dominate AGI, but now, with lots of players in the game, a “normal capital structure where everyone has stock” is simpler.
The nonprofit side of OpenAI won’t just be in the driving seat; it’ll also become a big shareholder in this new PBC. According to Altman, this means the nonprofit will get a hefty chunk of resources to pour into programmes that help AI benefit different communities.
As the PBC makes more money, the nonprofit gets more cash to splash on projects in areas like health, education, and science. They’re even getting a special commission to dream up ways their nonprofit work can make AI more democratic.
Altman wrapped things up with a healthy dose of optimism, saying, “We believe this sets us up to continue to make rapid, safe progress and to put great AI in the hands of everyone.”
OpenAI is clearly trying to attract the colossal funding needed for AGI development while hard-wiring its “benefit all of humanity” mantra into its very DNA. It’s a delicate tightrope walk, and you can bet the entire tech world, and probably a good chunk of the rest of us, will be watching to see if they can pull it off.
(Image by Mohamed Hassan)
See also: Google AMIE: AI doctor learns to ‘see’ medical images
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