OpenAI’s Sudden Leadership Exodus Signals Doom for Non-Profit Mission: Report

The late Wednesday departures of three OpenAI leaders -- including CTO Mira Murati -- conspicuously coincided with Thursday reports of the company’s moves to restructure its organization to a completely for-profit business.

Bloomberg reported that the company is discussing giving CEO Sam Altman a 7% equity stake -- (none of the board members received any equity stake as part of the company’s mixed for-profit/non-profit structure).

During a speaking event at Italian Tech Week Thursday, Altman confirmed the plan to restructure but said the departures of Murati and senior research executives were not linked to the plans. Major shifts started at the company after last year’s attempted ouster of Altman -- which included Murati’s brief promotion to CEO.

When the dust settled, the board was reconfigured to add more corporate players, like Bret Taylor, former Salesforce co-CEO and gave Microsoft a non-voting role. Months later, former board member and a key vote in the attempted coup Ilya Sutskever departed OpenAI to start his own AI business focused on AI Safety, called Safe Superintelligence. Co-Founder and President Greg Brockman last month announced that he was taking a sabbatical through the end of 2024.

Elon Musk, the Tesla founder and former OpenAI founding member, called a report that Altman would receive an equity stake “deeply wrong.” Musk has an active lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the company had turned back on its original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity over profit motives. Musk’s own artificial intelligence company xAI -- a for-profit business -- raised $6 billion in its latest funding round in May.

Related:Is OpenAI Quietly Building a Media Content Empire?

A Threat to Safe AI, or Growing Pains?

Last year, Altman appeared before Congress to discuss the future of AI and potential regulations, saying the industry needed guidance. ChatGPT’s near overnight success had ignited a generative AI arms race along with serious concerns about existential dangers to humanity.

But it was corporate interest that saved Altman’s position at the company. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pulled his own power play, threatening to hire away OpenAI’s talent base. Microsoft, with its $13 billion investment and 49% stake in OpenAI, held sway and managed to turn the tables on the coup. Eventually, Altman would be reinstated.

That’s when OpenAI -- which once prided itself on its mixed non-profit/for-profit structure -- started changing its mission trajectory, observers say.

“That’s the obvious risk here is the potential for what I call mission drift,” says Manoj Saxena, CEO and founder of Responsible AI Institute and an InformationWeek Insight Circle member. “They could start drifting from the original mission to create broadly beneficial AI to now prioritizing profits over social responsibility.”

Related:OpenAI Employees Pen Letter Calling for Whistleblower Protections

Saxena worries that AI safety becoming “more of a feature than a purpose … obviously that opens up more avenues for harm.”

But there could be some benefits as companies shift to viewing AI safety as a shared responsibility, Saxena says in a phone interview. “I think broadly this is actually going to promote more companies to take over responsible and safe AI in their own hands and not depend on model providers,” he says. “This is going to drive more companies to start building their own trustworthy, private large language models.”

Saxena says quickly changing market conditions have OpenAI’s GenAI competitors -- like Anthropic, Meta, and Google -- expanding rapidly. That’s putting pressure on the company to switch to a for-profit structure that is more appealing to investors.

Reuters cited anonymous sources who said plans for the restructuring were still under negotiation and no timeline was available.