The tension between OpenAI’s altruistic nonprofit roots and an internal push towards prioritizing profitability over safety is coming to a head. Recent news of mass resignations and a rumored shift toward for-profit status highlight how CEO Sam Altman has steered the company in a new direction. The news that the company’s nonprofit days could end has some pondering: Has success warped yet another Silicon Valley darling, or was this the plan all along?
Resignations pile up as rumors swirl
A mass exodus of executives and cofounders continues amid news of a restructuring that will make OpenAI more attractive to potential investors. The company’s longtime chief technology officer, Mira Murati, announced her departure to “create the time and space to do my own exploration.” That same day, chief research officer Bob McGrew and VP of post-training Barret Zoph also resigned. The leadership changes are a “natural part of companies,” Altman said in an X post following Murati’s decision to step down. The abruptness admittedly overtook him, “but we are not a normal company,” he said.
Since ChatGPT‘s release changed the company’s trajectory, several employees have jumped ship. The mass exodus has been “particularly pronounced this year,” said The Wall Street Journal. More than twenty other researchers and executives have quit this year, including co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former top researcher John Schulman and former researcher Jan Leike.
The latest resignations come as reports spread that OpenAI is planning to restructure itself as a for-profit enterprise next year, a “seismic shift” for the company that started as a non-profit, the Journal said. OpenAI was founded in 2015 to “benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” according to a statement published at the time. Reports say the company could now be valued at $150 billion. There were also alleged talks of Altman receiving a 7% equity stake in the company, which would “mark the first time Altman is granted ownership in the artificial intelligence startup,” Bloomberg said. Altman dismissed those claims as “just not true” at an all-hands staff meeting, CNBC reported.
Silicon Valley strikes again?
The pivot to for-profit status unmasks “what has long been happening within the company,” Karen Hao said in The Atlantic. The nonprofit arm has continued to exist, but all the outside investments go “directly into the for-profit, which also hires the company’s employees.” The board crisis in which Altman was temporarily ousted tested the power between the two. Ultimately, “the money won, and Altman ended up on top.” If reports are true, the new public structure will simply reflect “what the company has been — in effect, the will of a single person.”
It is worth noting that Altman’s pivot “isn’t an anomaly,” Parmy Olson said at Bloomberg. It is a “recurring Silicon Valley theme” of “defining oneself with a lofty mission that’s eventually eclipsed by rapid growth and profit.” As long as they operate in “a regulatory vacuum,” tech companies will “continue to paint a mirage about their objectives,” Olsen said. “If Altman’s latest actions make that more apparent, so much the better.”