Image source: generated by Unbounded AI

Last Friday night, OpenAI suddenly announced the news of the company's reorganization, which not only caught Musk, but also us a little off guard .

According to OpenAI’s latest statement, the new round of organizational restructuring is centered around the contradiction between for-profit and non-profit.

After the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI has become the hottest startup company in the global technology field. However, with the launch of its generative AI products, people have also begun to have doubts about its original intention of being "not for profit" when it was founded. question. Elon Musk even turned against OpenAI and filed a lawsuit.

In the middle of this year, some media predicted that OpenAI would turn into a for-profit organization in 2025, but it seems that this process has to be accelerated.

It all seems to have come too early. OpenAI’s expression of the new architecture immediately aroused controversy, and netizens’ comments were generally negative.

Of course there are positive reviews, but not many.

As of the time of publication of this article, Musk, Altman and other stakeholders have not commented publicly on the matter. However, what is interesting is that Altman sent a series of tweets to thank many OpenAI veterans who have resigned after OpenAI announced the organizational restructuring.

I wonder if Ultraman is "connecting with the past" in this way.

The following is the full text of the blog published by OpenAI.

To advance our mission, why OpenAI’s organizational structure must evolve

Use for-profit success to support stronger nonprofit endeavors.

The OpenAI Board of Directors is evaluating our corporate structure to best support our mission: ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. We had three goals:

Select a nonprofit or for-profit structure that would be best for the long-term success of this mission. Making nonprofits sustainable. Let each part do its job.

As of today, we have a nonprofit and a for-profit organization, and we will continue to have both. The success of a for-profit organization allows the nonprofit to be well-funded, better supported, and in a better position to fulfill its mission.

We believe this mission is the most important challenge of our time. It requires simultaneously improving AI’s capabilities, safety, and positive impact on the world. In this article, we share the history of our current structure, why we believe change is necessary, and what specific changes we are considering.

The Past

We were founded in 2015 as a research lab. Our vision is that AGI can reallyNow, we hope to help them as much as possible. In the early days, we believed that progress relied on key ideas coming from top researchers, and that supercomputing clusters were less important.

We conduct experiments ranging from gaming AI toolkits to robotics research and published papers. We have no product, no business, and no commercial revenue.

The goal we gave at the time was to "advance digital intelligence in a way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, without being constrained by the need to generate financial returns." A non-profit structure seemed to be a good fit, and we Raised donations in various forms, including cash ($137 million, less than a third of which came from Musk) and computing credits and discounts ($1.8 million from Amazon, $50 million or more each from Azure and Google Cloud) .

Ultimately, it is clear that state-of-the-art AI will continue to use more and more computation, and scaling up large language models is a promising path to AGI that is rooted in human understanding . To fulfill our mission, donations are not enough; we need far more computing and therefore more capital.

Now

In 2019 we went from a lab to a startup. We estimate we need to raise around $10 billion to build AGI. This level of computing and human capital means we need to partner with investors to continue the nonprofit’s mission.

We created a custom structure: a for-profit organization controlled by a non-profit, with investors and employees having a cap on their share of profits. We intend to earn huge profits⁠ to ​​reward shareholders, make our mission possible, and funnel the remaining funds to nonprofit organizations. We rephrased our mission: “Ensure that general artificial intelligence benefits all mankind” and plan to achieve this goal “primarily by trying to build safe general artificial intelligence and share the benefits with the world.” Changes in words and methods are all designed to serve the same goal - the benefit of humanity.

That year, OpenAI, a for-profit organization, raised more than $100 million in its first round of funding and later raised another $1 billion from Microsoft.

By 2020, in order to raise additional funding, we will need to prove that our technology can generate revenue before reaching AGI. So we built our first product. Along the way, we learned how different real-world security is from what we expected in the lab. At the same time, we are also starting to deliver the “benefit” part of our mission without having to wait until we achieve artificial general intelligence.

In 2022, we launched ChatGPT, a product that brings artificial intelligence into the daily lives of ordinary people. Today, more than 300 million people use it every week to be more productive at work, study, and more, mostly for free.

In 2024, we discovered a new research paradigm: the o-series models demonstrate new reasoning capabilities that can be extended by "thinking" calculations and stacked with training calculations.

Our impact is not just what we create, but how we impact others. Part of this is due to our progress, the energy and competition in the field⁠, from commercial products like ChatGPT to open source large models, to active innovation in various fields⁠, the pursuit of security⁠ and so on. This event is just the beginning of the AI ​​economy, with OpenAI demonstrating its pursuit of leadership in the field and inspiring other organizations to advance this mission together.

The hundreds of billions of dollars currently invested in AI development by major companies show the real investment OpenAI needs to continue pursuing its mission. Again we need to raise more capital than we thought. Although investors want to support us, in the face of such large-scale capital, they need a regular equity structure rather than an overly solidified structure.

The future

As we move into 2025, we are going to have to become more than a lab and a startup – we have to become a sustainable business.

Based on the Board’s consultation with external legal and financial advisors to consider how best to build OpenAI to advance the mission of advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI) to benefit all mankind, the Board’s goals are to:

< p> 1. Select a nonprofit/for-profit structure best suited to drive the success of this mission over the long term

Our plan is to convert an existing for-profit corporation into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation ( PBC/Delaware Public Benefit Corporation) and issue common stock, the public benefit of PBC will be OpenAI’s mission. A PBC is a structure, also used by many other companies, that requires companies to balance shareholder interests, stakeholder interests and the public interest in their decision-making processes. It will allow us to raise the required capital on regular terms, like other companies in this space.

2. Making nonprofits sustainable

Our plan will make OpenAI one of the most resourceful nonprofits in history. A non-profit's significant equity stake in an existing for-profit company will be in the form of shares in the PBC, with the fair valuation of the shares determined by an independent financial advisor. This will multiply the resources provided by our donors.

3. Make every department count

Our current structure does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who finance our mission, nor does it make it easy for nonprofits Make decisions that go beyond controlling a for-profit company. PBC will be responsible for operating and controlling OpenAI's business operations, while the non-profit organization will employ a leadership team and staff toCommitted to promoting philanthropy in the fields of health care, education and science.

We’ve learned to think of OpenAI’s mission as a sustainable goal, not just building a single system. Today’s world is building new infrastructure including energy, land use, chips, data centers, data, AI models and AI systems to serve the 21st century economy.

We seek to continually evolve to take the next step in our mission to help build the AGI economy and ensure it benefits people.

Although OpenAI’s blog spends a lot of time clarifying their mission and efforts to ensure the sustainable development of the mission. But it did not relieve netizens’ doubts: Is it for-profit or not-for-profit? This is a problem.

There is no doubt that OpenAI has introduced an unusual company organizational structure model here, which has caused confusion among many people.

According to the introduction: In a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), the board of directors is responsible for managing the company so that it has a fiduciary responsibility to the company and maximizes value for shareholders, in conjunction with other parties affected by the company's operations. interests of groups including employees, customers, suppliers, the environment or society as a whole. The public benefit described may be related to the commercial business of the public benefit corporation, but it does not need to be related.

For example, in a public good related to the company's business, a vitamin company could pledge to donate some of its products to malnourished mothers or third world orphanages to improve public health.

To ensure this purpose, the board of directors is responsible for issuing a biennial public service report. The report must be distributed to shareholders and may be made more widely available at the public benefit corporation's leisure. Reports must describe the company's efforts to achieve public benefit purposes and provide specific guidance on their progress and the standards and metrics for measuring such progress.

Unlike similar reports required by public benefit corporations in other U.S. states, the biennial reports prepared by Delaware Public Benefit Corporations (PBCs) do not have to be completed in compliance with or use the measures of a third-party standard or accreditation agency. , although a company may adopt such standards or obtain certification from a third-party certification body as it sees fit. Public benefit corporations do not have to make this report public.

What do you think of this round of adjustments to OpenAI’s organizational structure?

Reference content: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1872628736690123213https://openai.com/index/why-our-structure-must-evolve-to-advance-our-mission/