ICYMI... HIBT Lab! OpenAI: Sam Altman
How I Built This with Guy Raz
Why OpenAI went from non profit to for profit?
OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to for-profit because they realized that massive scale was more important than they initially expected. The amount of money required to succeed at their mission was beyond what they could raise as a nonprofit. They explored government funding but it was not available. OpenAI wanted to preserve the specialness of the non-profit approach while accessing the resources they needed, so they adopted a for-profit model. They implemented safety features and incentives, such as a profit cap to distribute profits fairly and the ability for the board to wipe out everyone's equity value if necessary. They also had provisions for emergency assistance and the ability to merge with other efforts to avoid a race condition. These measures were necessary to access the capital they needed, which turned out to be far greater than they had anticipated.
