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It has been a wild ride for OpenAI in the past week or so. Both current and former employees have started to speak up about the OpenAI’s future.
Chaos kicked off last week when several prominent employees, including OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati and top researchers Barret Zoph and Bob McGrew announced that they were leaving the company.
A day later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the rumors that the company was indeed considering ditching its non-profit status and becoming a for-profit company instead.
This has sparked a lot of discussion and debate about the direction in which OpenAI is heading and what it means for the future of the company and AI.
OpenAI is has keep complete silence regarding this whole restructuring situation. They have not made any official announcements but CEO Sam Altman did mention that they are exploring this change as a way to reach their next stage of development.
This shift towards becoming a for-profit company seems to be connected to the fact that they want to raise billions in new investments.
Naturally, people are curious about what’s really going on behind the scenes at OpenAI, especially with the recent resignations of several key executives and researchers.
Some are speculating that there might be internal disagreements about the company’s direction of prioritizing profit over their original non-profit mission.
It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds and what it means for the future of OpenAI and the development of AI in general.
According to some of OpenAI’s departing employees, there is internal concern that the shift to a for-profit company confirms what they already suspected: Altman is prioritizing profit over safety.
When OpenAI safety leader Jan Leike announced his resignation in May, he said on X he had thought it would be “the best place in the world to do this research.” By the time he left, however, he said he had reached a “breaking point” with OpenAI’s leadership over the company’s core priorities.
Gretchen Krueger, a former policy researcher at OpenAI, said the company’s nonprofit governance structure and cap on profits were part of the reason she joined in 2019 — the year that OpenAI added a for-profit arm. “This feels like a step in the wrong direction, when what we need is multiple steps in the right direction,” she said on X.
She said OpenAI’s bid to transition into a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company intended to generate social good — isn’t enough. As one of the biggest developers of artificial general intelligence, OpenAI needs “stronger mission locks,” she wrote.
Noam Brown, a researcher at OpenAI, firmly disagrees that the company has lost its focus on research. “Those of us at @OpenAI working on o1 find it strange to hear outsiders claim that OpenAI has deprioritized research. I promise you all, it’s the opposite,” he wrote on X on Friday.
Mark Chen, the senior vice president of research at OpenAI, also reaffirmed his commitment to OpenAI. “I truly believe that OpenAI is the best place to work on AI, and I’ve been through enough ups and downs to know it’s never wise to bet against us,” he wrote on X.