You mean when they filled out a form to incorporate their non-profit. Which they later turned into a for-profit company after reaping all the goodwill. The “Open” used to mean something.
That is a bit reductionist. They turned it into a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit entity, with profits / returns being capped for employees / investors.
When they founded? Yes. The issue was that the big AI players (Google, Facebook, etc.) were keeping their models and training data secret. People (rightly, IMHO) saw this opaque development style as a risk. The OpenAI founders made a big splash by registering as a non-profit and declaring that they were going to do all their model training in public, and share the weights for everyone to use. In other words they were claiming to do something more like what Stability AI is today, except with a stronger legal non-profit organization.
Because of that framing, they poached a lot of very good talent and built one of the best AI teams that has ever been assembled. Then they perverted their corporate structure to be effective for-profit, and renegaded on open access to their trained models, turning into a bog standard service-oriented company.
Nonprofit status makes it much harder to extract large profits. A charity founder can pay himself a million-dollar salary, but he can't sell his shares in the nonprofit and become a billionaire.
> Nonprofit status makes it much harder to extract large profits. A charity founder can pay himself a million-dollar salary, but he can't sell his shares in the nonprofit and become a billionaire.
What difference does it make for a non-public company? They can pay themselves more salary either way. The shares aren't really valuable until then.
As to a charity - if you really believe so. It doesn't even enter the books. Have you not seen an in-person donation site? Someone gives $100, the staff keeps the $100, takes out $50, records $50 and puts that in the donation box. After a few more layers the actual donation could be just $1. I've seen these at your regular big name charities - all the time.
And let's not get started on the sponsor a child that doesn't exist options...
They are not confused. "OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact."[1]
