OpenAI Execs Mass Quit as Company Removes

Control From Non-Profit Board and Hands It to Sam Altman

 

 

 

It’s a massive shakeup.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI is losing even more executives right as Reuters reports that it’s looking to restructure its core business and wrestle control away from its non-profit board.

The restructuring could turn the already for-profit company into a more traditional startup and give CEO Sam Altman even more control including likely equity worth billions of dollars.

As Reuters points out, the move will likely make the company more attractive to investors, who have already poured many billions into it.

Executives at OpenAI, however, appear to be significantly less enthused with the plans. The announcements made by OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, vice president of research Barret Zoph, and chief research officer Bob McGrew on Wednesday afternoon suggested serious internal strife within the organization.

Altman downplayed the big restructure in an X statement.

“Leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially companies that grow so quickly and are so demanding,” he said. “I won’t pretend that this was an inevitable abrupt decision, but we are not a typical firm, and I believe that the reasons Mira gave me that there is never a suitable time, that anything less sudden would have leaked, and that she wanted to do this while while OpenAI was in an upswing) make sense.”

The restructuring’s specifics are still being worked out behind the scenes, according to people close to Reuters, and there is no set date for when it will take effect. Still, it’s another example of the ongoing power struggle among the executive board of the corporation. Could anyone forget the day the firm fired Altman without warning and then hired him back after just five days?

With the addition of a for-profit division to its organizational structure in 2019, OpenAI ceased to be primarily a non-profit resigned in anger due to the move’s level of controversy.

Since then, it has raised billions of dollars in funding, including a juicy $13 billion contract with corporate tech giant Microsoft. It has seen its valuation rocket from just $14 billion in 2021 to potentially $150 billion lately, according to its latest financing efforts.
Meanwhile, the company is burning through cash at an alarming rate. According to a July analysis by The Information, OpenAI could lose as much as $5 billion this year as it rapidly expands the infrastructure needed to sustain increasingly electricity- and water-hungry AI models.

OpenAI‘s non-profit arm was originally created to ensure that it was developing a “safe” artificial general intelligence, an AI that surpasses human capabilities and that “benefits all of humanity,” according to its mission statement.

The “non-profit is core to our mission and will continue to exist,” an OpenAI spokeswoman asserted in a statement to Reuters. It is, at best, uncertain whether it will have any influence in a for-profit regulatory framework that is mostly under Altman’s control.

And at best, its commitment to self-accountability has been fragile. The business disbanded its safety-focused Superalignment team in May and appointed Altman to lead a new safety board instead.

If powerful AIs in the future managed to outsmart us, it would be because they were aligned with humanity, which is why the old Superalignment team was formed. Concerns about OpenAI‘s capacity to do that after leaving the team have been expressed by numerous former members.

Whether OpenAI will ever get even close to realizing AGI remains to be seen. The company’s current crop of AI models are still wrestling with the same problems earlier iterations have also suffered from, including “hallucinations,” and an inability to make sense of data in a logically sound way.

And the pressure is on with a valuation of well over $100 billion, investors are likely going to ask some big questions that Altman and the other remaining executives may struggle to answer in the future.

“There’s an exodus of executives from OpenAI, the company is burning billions a year, its enterprise offerings are widely criticized, Sam Altman appears to spend half of his day doing podcasts, and there is still no proven business model,” author and tech columnist Brian Merchant tweeted. “This company is seeking a $150 billion valuation.”