To continue its mission to benefit everyone, OpenAI will become entirely for-profit

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” to benefit all of humanity and the entire world.

This will continue to be the case, the organization said in a statement message on Friday, even as it restructures from a nonprofit-controlled corporation to a stand-alone corporation that happens to throw a lot of money at a related nonprofit.

How does this restructuring help OpenAI fulfill its mission to benefit all people and non-human things? Well, that’s simple. “OpenAI’s current structure does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who would fund the mission.” Under the new structure, OpenAI’s leadership will finally be able to raise more money and address the needs of billionaires and trillion-dollar tech companies dollars that invest in it. Voila, everyone wins.

The press release didn’t mention the fact that a year ago, the nonprofit board that ran OpenAI tried unsuccessfully to give CEO Sam Altman the go-ahead for “outright lie” in ways that, according to former board member Helen Toner, make it difficult for the board to ensure that “the company’s public good mission is primary, comes first — ahead of profits, investor interests, and other things.”

With its new structure, OpenAI wants to maintain at least a facade of altruism. The for-profit company will be incorporated as a Delaware public benefit corporation, meaning its board can consider how the company’s actions affect stakeholders such as employees and customers in addition to its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders (corporate law experts have pointed out that normal corporations are also perfectly free to do so).

Other publicly traded public benefit corporations in Delaware include Laureate Education, which operates a string of for-profit universities around the world, including one that was indicted repeatedly to mislead students about the cost of its degree programs (Laureate sold Walden University before the university sedimentation class action earlier this year for $28.5 million). Another is Lemonade Inc., an insurance company that once advertisedand quickly apologized for an AI feature it claimed could detect fraudulent customers by analyzing their faces.

Mixed in with everyone effective accelerator saviorism in OpenAI’s announcement, is the clear message that the new company plans to raise a lot more money to continue its pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI). According to information from The informationOpenAI and Microsoft have defined AGI as systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. You know, the hallmark of intelligence.

What will happen to the nonprofit that currently controls the company is less clear, though it certainly won’t cost money. It wasn’t a very traditional nonprofit at first, but quickly amassed $137 million in donated money from Elon Musk and other tech moguls in addition to more than $100 million in free computing from Google, Microsoft and others to create generative AI systems that now benefit for-profit corporations.

After the corporate transition is complete, the nonprofit will have no oversight responsibilities at OpenAI, but will receive equity in the new nonprofit and will be “one of the most well-resourced nonprofits in history,” according to a press release from OpenAI release. This will allow it to “pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health, education and science”.

Needless to say, it won’t be long before we all begin to benefit from his charity.