what happen?
According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is planning to transform from its current non-profit organizational structure into a for-profit company. One of the reasons is to allow employees to make money by selling shares. After all, the most scarce resource in this era is talent.
While OpenAI is reorganizing its internal structure, the company is also facing severe personnel turmoil. Including technical chief Mira. Mira Murati, research chief Bob McGrew and others announced their resignations one after another.
What’s the difference between OpenAI becoming a for-profit company?
The Wall Street Journal pointed out that OpenAI is raising US$6.5 billion in funding, with major investors including Microsoft, NVIDIA and other venture capital, as well as a UAE-backed AI investment company MGX.
According to the agreement, OpenAI must transform into a public benefit corporation (Public Benefit Corporation) within two years, which means that while pursuing profit, it must be committed to creating social welfare. If this transformation cannot be completed, investors will have the right to withdraw their funds.
In addition to meeting the regulatory requirements of at least two states in the United States, this transformation process must also determine how to allocate shares and funds. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the purpose of this transformation is to simplify OpenAI’s corporate structure, lift the current restrictions on profit-making for non-profit organizations, and make it easier for employees to realize equity realization.
"CNBC" reported that the profits of OpenAI investors are currently limited to 100 times, and the excess will be used to support the company's social welfare mission. After transforming into a for-profit company, investors may be more motivated to participate.
OpenAI also faces high-level exodus
While OpenAI is reorganizing its internal structure, the company is also facing severe personnel turmoil.
Recently, the company has successively reported news of important high-level resignations, including Chief Technology Officer Mira. Mira Murati, chief of research Bob McGrew, and vice president of post-training Barrett Zoph announced their resignations.
A few months ago, it was co-founder Ilya. Ilya Sutskever and core researcher Jan Leike left the company. According to "The Verge", among the current 11 co-founders of OpenAI, only three, including CEO Sam Altman, remain in the company.
Although Altman said that these personnel changes are part of the company's "natural development", and Mulati also said that he left OpenAI to "create time and space for his own exploration," such a leadership change in such a short period of time is still Adding many questions to the outside world.
Has OpenAI’s “original intention” changed?
OpenAI was originally a research-oriented non-profit laboratory with the original intention of promoting "the development of general artificial intelligence (AGI) that can benefit all mankind." However, OpenAI later became more like an ordinary technology company, focusing on launching products quickly, which also caused dissatisfaction among many employees and researchers, who believed that the company was deviating from its original research and safety commitments.
"The Verge" pointed out that when GPT-4 was released, the security team was forced to work overtime because of the schedule and did not even have time to carefully check the security of the system. This reflects that the company seems to have sacrificed its past focus on AI safety in order to seize market opportunities and gradually loses the time flexibility to research models.
Now that OpenAI is facing a transformation, how the company will find a balance between its two missions of business and creating social welfare will become a major challenge.
Source: WSJ, CNBC, The Verge
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