Openai said on Monday that it is restructured as a public benefit company, allowing the non -profit organization that it controls Openai to maintain its handle in the company.
The decision is a victory for Openai critics, including one of its founders, Elon Musk, who complained that the company was very focused on profits and had abandoned its early plan to build artificial intelligence systems safely.
The changes announced on Monday are the last years of corporate drama for what many consider to be the most important AI company in the world. Openai’s Chatgpt Chatbot, released in late 2022, was a night’s success that sent the rest of the technological industry. Only a few years, Tech’s largest companies have spent billions with their own AI projects, with hundreds of billions more planned for this decade.
Mr Musk, who is now running his own company AI, sued Openai for the plans it has implemented to change its corporate structure from an unorthodox system that gave a non -profit supervision of a profit company. But he was not the only critic of OpenAi’s scheduled changes. The Attorney General in California, where Openai is also based in Delaware, where it was legally created, also said they were watching its restructuring. California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said in a statement that he had revised the new Openai plan.
And in recent weeks, several legal community academics and experts such as Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Nobel Prize last year for his innovative AI research, also publicly expressed his concern about the direction of Openai.
The argument about how Openai should be structured and what should his priorities be reached out to a fundamental question about artificial intelligence: Should researchers have rushed to sink to develop new and stronger AI systems? Or is the theoretical danger of AI to humanity to inform all that these researchers create?
Openai started in 2015 with this intensity.
Sam Altman, Managing Director of Openai, created the organization of artificial intelligence with several other Silicon Valley figures as a non -profit organization in late 2015.
But the non -profit maintenance of its handle in a structure that some saw as an albetter in the development of the company. Last year, Mr Altman and his company began working in a plan to shift control from the non -profit organization to Openai investors so that it was more attractive to them.
Shortly afterwards, Mr Musk sued Openai, Mr Altman and another founder, Greg Brockman, in the federal court, claiming that they had put the company’s trade interests and AI before the public good.
This year, Mr Musk and an investor consortium also offered to buy the assets of the non -profit organization that controls Openai for more than $ 97 billion. The OpenAi Board of Directors rejected the offer.
Now the company has been mainly coated by the plan to shift control away from the non -profit organization. It is not clear whether the new structure, which allows the non -profit to be Openai’s largest shareholder, will affect Mr Musk’s treatment.
A public benefit company is often described as an organization designed to create public and social good and allows foreigners to invest the same way they invest in other companies.
“I am very happy to have made the decision on the non -profit organization to maintain control,” Mr Altman said during a press conference. He added that the new change “puts us in order to have a more understandable structure to do the things a company like ours must do.”
Openai said he was still negotiating the share of the non -profit company in the new company and that the non -profit organization would choose the members of the Board of Directors of the new entity.
“I am pleased that the Board of Directors seems to have worked with regulators and that the non -profit organization will maintain control,” said Jill R. Horwitz, a law professor at Northwestern University specializing in non -profit organizations. “But we don’t know what check still means.”
The Group’s Japanese Softbank has recently led a $ 40 billion funding round to OpenAi, which estimates the company at $ 300 billion. If this shift is not completed by the end of the year, Softbank will be able to reduce its total contribution to $ 20 billion, a person was familiar with the latest investment agreement.
Mr Altman said he was sure that funding would not be reduced.
“We made the decision for the non -profit organization to maintain OpenAi’s control after hearing from citizens’ leaders and to participate in a constructive dialogue with the applications of Delaware’s Attorney General and the California Attorney General,” said Openai President Bret Taylor.
(The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against Openai and its Microsoft partner, accusing them of copyright violations on the content of AI -related news.
