Why OpenAI’s Structure Must Evolve To Advance Our Mission

post by stuhlmueller · 2024-12-28T04:24:19.937Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

This is a link post for https://openai.com/index/why-our-structure-must-evolve-to-advance-our-mission/

Contents

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The section "The Future":

As we enter 2025, we will have to become more than a lab and a startup — we have to become an enduring company. The Board’s objectives as it considers, in consultation with outside legal and financial advisors, how to best structure OpenAI to advance the mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity have been:

  1. Choose a non-profit / for-profit structure that is best for the long-term success of the mission. Our plan is to transform our existing for-profit into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation⁠ (PBC) with ordinary shares of stock and the OpenAI mission as its public benefit interest. The PBC is a structure⁠ used⁠ by⁠ many⁠ others⁠ that requires the company to balance shareholder interests, stakeholder interests, and a public benefit interest in its decisionmaking. It will enable us to raise the necessary capital with conventional terms like others in this space.
  2. Make the non-profit sustainable. Our plan would result in one of the best resourced non-profits in history. The non-profit’s significant interest in the existing for-profit would take the form of shares in the PBC at a fair valuation determined by independent financial advisors. This will multiply the resources that our donors gave manyfold.
  3. Equip each arm to do its part. Our current structure does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who would finance the mission and does not enable the non-profit to easily do more than control the for-profit. The PBC will run and control OpenAI’s operations and business, while the non-profit will hire a leadership team and staff to pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science.

We’ve learned to think of the mission as a continuous objective rather than just building any single system. The world is moving to build out a new infrastructure of energy, land use, chips, datacenters, data, AI models, and AI systems for the 21st century economy. We seek to evolve in order to take the next step in our mission, helping to build the AGI economy and ensuring it benefits humanity.

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comment by James Payor (JamesPayor) · 2024-12-28T19:16:50.389Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah so, I consider this writeup utter trash, current OpenAI board members should be ashamed of having explicitly or implicitly signed off on it, employees should be embarrassed to be a part of it, etc.

That aside:

Are they going to keep the Charter and merge-and-assist? (Has this been dead in the water for years now anyway? Are there reasons Anthropic hasn't said something similar in public?)

Is it necessary to completely expunge the non-profit from oversight and relevance to day-to-day operations? (Probably not!)