Why OpenAI’s structure must evolve to advance our mission

OpenAI

A stronger non-profit supported by the for-profit’s success.

OpenAI’s Board of Directors is evaluating our corporate structure in order to best support the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI)¹ benefits all of humanity, with three objectives:

1. Choose a non-profit / for-profit structure that is best for the long-term success of the mission.

2. Make the non-profit sustainable.

3. Equip each arm to do its part.

We have a non-profit and a for-profit today, and we will continue to have both, with the for-profit’s success enabling the non-profit to be well funded, better sustained, and in a stronger position for the mission.

We view this mission as the most important challenge of our time. It requires simultaneously advancing AI’s capability, safety, and positive impact in the world. In this post, we share the history of our current structure, why we think a change is necessary, and what specific change we are considering.

The past

We began in 2015 as a research lab with a vision that AGI might really happen, and we wanted to help it go as well as possible. In these early days, we thought that progress relied on key ideas produced by top researchers and that supercomputing clusters were less important.

We performed experiments ranging from toolkits for game-playing AI to robotics research and published papers. We had no products, no business, and no commercial revenue.

Our stated goal was “advancing digital intelligence in the way most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” A non-profit structure seemed fitting, and we raised donations in various forms including cash ($137M, less than a third of which was from Elon) and compute credits and discounts ($1.8M from Amazon and $50M or more from each of Azure and Google Cloud).

The present

That year, the for-profit raised an initial round of over $100M, followed by $1 billion from Microsoft.