Once upon a time, the company known as OpenAI started off as a non-profit company. The for-profit side of things didn’t even exist until 2019, according to the company’s own website. But it looks like the younger side of the company is going to be taking control of the organisation. Over the weekend, the board has decided to transition said for-profit arm into what’s called a Public Benefit Corporation.
For context, a PBC is an organisation that tries to balance profit and still providing a positive impact on society. According to the announcement post, this change was deemed necessary as improving AI tech “would need far more compute, and therefore far more capital, than we could obtain with donations in order to pursue our mission”.
The post notes that this is set to happen sometime in 2025, which is a mere two days away at the time of writing. As part of the change, “the PBC will run and control OpenAI’s operations and business, while the non-profit will hire a leadership team an staff to pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science”.
In a way, it may be thanks to the for-profit arm that the public got a taste of ChatGPT, with paying customers obviously getting the juicier cuts of the tech. But it remains to be seen what this transition would mean for the company in the longer term, and in what way it will affect its users and non-enterprise customers.
(Source: OpenAI [1], [2])
