In furtherance of its Mission to Benefit Everyone, OpenAI will be Fully Profitable

The thing you need to know about OpenAI, according to OpenAI, is that its sole purpose is to solve “the most important challenge of our time” for the benefit of all humanity and the world.

That will continue, the organization said in an announcement Friday, as it restructures itself from a company controlled by a nonprofit organization to a stand-alone company that may throw more money at its nonprofit affiliates.

How does this restructuring help OpenAI achieve its goal of benefiting all humans and nonhumans? Well, it’s easy. “OpenAI’s current structure does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who will fund the project.” Under the new structure, OpenAI’s leadership will finally be able to raise more money and pay attention to the needs of the billionaires and trillion dollar technology firms that invest in them. Voila, everyone benefits.

What was not mentioned in the press release was that last year the non-profit board that oversaw OpenAI tried to give CEO Sam Altman the boot for “lying” in ways that, according to former board member Helen Toner, made it difficult. for the board to ensure that “the company’s good public policy was primary, it came first—above profit, the interests of investors, and other things,”

With its new structure, OpenAI wants to maintain at least a facade of altruism. A for-profit company will be incorporated as a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, which means its board can consider how the company’s actions affect stakeholders such as employees and customers in addition to its fiduciary duty to shareholders (Corporate law experts have pointed out that ordinary companies are also completely free to do this).

Other publicly traded Delaware Public Benefit Corporations include Laureate Education, which operates a chain of for-profit universities around the world, including one that has been repeatedly accused of misleading students about the cost of its degree programs (Laureate sold Walden University before the university settled a class-action lawsuit earlier this year for $1 million 28.5). Another is Lemonade Inc., an insurance company that once advertised, and quickly apologized for, an AI feature that said it could detect fraudulent customers by analyzing their faces.

Combined with all the accelerationist saviorisms at work in the OpenAI announcement, the clear message is that the new company plans to raise a ton of money to further its quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI). According to a report from The Information, OpenAI and Microsoft have described AGI as programs that can generate at least 100 billion profits. You know, a sign of intelligence.

What will happen to the nonprofit that oversees the company is currently unclear, though it won’t be pinching pennies. It wasn’t a traditional nonprofit at first, as I quickly raised $137 million in donations from Elon Musk and other tech giants in addition to $100 million in free computing from Google, Microsoft, and others to build the product. AI systems are now benefiting for-profit companies.

After the business transition is complete, the nonprofit will have no oversight duties at OpenAI but will acquire shares in the new for-profit company and become “one of the most well-resourced nonprofits in history,” according to OpenAI’s press release. release. That would allow it to “pursue philanthropic programs in areas such as health care, education and science.”

Needless to say, it won’t be long before we all start benefiting from helping the poor.