OpenAI's history as a nonprofit research institute that also sells commercial products like ChatGPT may be coming to an end as the San Francisco company looks to more fully convert itself into a for-profit corporation accountable to shareholders.
No final decision has been made by the board and the timing of the shift hasn’t been determined, the source said. “OpenAI will be stronger for it as we are for all of our transitions,” Altman told the Italian Tech Week event in Turin. “I saw some stuff that this was, like, related to a restructure. That’s totally not true. Most of the stuff I saw was also just totally wrong,” he said without any more specificity.
The exits were the latest in a string of recent high-profile departures that also include the resignations of OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and safety team leader Jan Leike in May. In a statement, Leike had leveledMuch of the conflict at OpenAI has been rooted in its unusual governance structure. Founded as a nonprofit with a mission to safely build futuristic AI to help humanity, it is now a fast-growing big business still controlled by a nonprofit board bound to its original mission.