The latest changes represent the culmination of a yearslong shift away from OpenAI’s foundations and toward a typical for-profit startup, experts told The Hill.
“Restructuring around a core for-profit entity formalizes what outsiders have known for some time: that OpenAI is seeking to profit in an industry that has received an enormous influx of investment in the last few years,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute.
Reports first emerged last week that OpenAI was considering restructuring into a public benefit corporation, a for-profit entity aimed at bettering society, and removing the nonprofit board’s control over the company.
The shift comes as part of an effort to attract investors amid OpenAI’s latest fundraising round, which it announced Wednesday had secured $6.6 billion in new funding at a valuation of $157 billion.
The news of its potential restructuring was accompanied by the departure of several top OpenAI executives, including chief technology officer Mira Murati.
The latest resignations followed a series of departures earlier this year, including OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman and machine learning researcher Jan Leike.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has sought to dispel any speculation that the recent departures are related to the company’s restructuring plans.
“We have been thinking about that, our board has, for almost a year, independently, as we think about what it takes to get to our next stage,” Altman said at Italian Tech Week in Turin last Thursday, according to Reuters.
Even if unconnected, the turnover at OpenAI and its restructuring plans appear to signal a shift in focus, Kreps noted.
“At least circumstantially, these changes — the shifting emphasis to for-profit, turnover at the top, as well as the dissolution of OpenAI’s super alignment team that focused on AI risk — points to an accelerated move into the boundary-pushing directions of AI research,” she said in a statement.
OpenAI dissolved its Superalignment team in May shortly after Sutskever and Leike announced their departures. The pair ran the team, formed less than a year earlier, that sought to address the potential dangers of superintelligence — AI that is smarter than humans.
“The moves collectively mark a potential departure from the company’s founding emphasis on safety, transparency, and an aim of not concentrating power in the development of artificial general intelligence,” Kreps added.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
