OpenAI is reportedly moving away from its complicated non-profit structure next year

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Sam Altman has told OpenAI staff members during their weekly meeting that the company is changing its rather convoluted non-profit corporate structure next year, according to
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. The CEO said OpenAI will move away from being controlled by a non-profit entity and will transition into a more traditional for-profit organization. He didn't delve into the specifics of how the company will achieve that goal and what OpenAI's corporate structure will look like exactly. A spokesperson only told Fortune that it remains "focused on building AI that benefits everyone" and that non-profit is "core to [its] mission and will continue to exist."

OpenAI started as a non-profit organization in 2015 that relied on money from donors. In a page
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, it said that it only raised $130.5 million in total donations over the years, which it says made it clear that "donations alone would not scale with the cost of computational power and talent required to push [its] core research forward." The then-purely non-profit organization created a
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subsidiary in order to solve that problem. As Fortune explains, OpenAI's non-profit entity currently controls its for-profit arm, which in turn controls a holding company that takes investments from companies like Microsoft.


Under this structure, the profit that can be allocated to investors, including Microsoft, has a cap. Anything OpenAI makes beyond the cap will go to its non-profit division. And the company's revenue is booming, according to a report by
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published in June. OpenAI reportedly
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its annualized revenue in the first half of the year, thanks to the subscription version of ChatGPT.

The company's complex structure also allowed OpenAI's non-profit board of directors to
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in 2023, because they "no longer [have] confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." Five days later, however, the board was disbanded and replaced, while Altman was
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.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
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