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The contradiction at the heart of OpenAI

Can OpenAI serve humanity — and investors?

Big changes are happening at OpenAI. On Wednesday, the company announced that it would be shutting down their AI video creation app Sora only a couple months after its launch. In October, OpenAI completed a massive restructure of its organization that shakes the very foundations it was built on.

OpenAI, which powers ChatGPT, among other AI products, was originally founded purely as a nonprofit. Now it has a for-profit arm. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the nonprofit will still guide the work of the for-profit side to ensure that artificial intelligence works for the “benefit of all humanity.” On top of that, the OpenAI Foundation, would be in charge of (theoretically) $180 billion, making it one of the largest charitable organizations in the world.

Catherine Bracy, founder of the nonprofit Tech Equity, thinks this restructuring is a blatant attempt to free up the for-profit wing to act like any other AI company. She argues that OpenAI’s for-profit wing will only ever act for the benefit of its investors. Bracy believes the OpenAI Foundation is merely a glorified and toothless corporate social responsibility arm. We reached out to OpenAI for comment and did not receive a response.

Bracy spoke with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram about the legality of OpenAI’s new structure and her concerns about how this all might shake out. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

(Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

You used to chat with Sam Altman?

We worked together back in the day and then kind of went out of touch with each other for a few years. Then, when I was writing a book about venture capital, I was really interested in open AI’s nonprofit model. Sam had been very explicit that the reason they founded OpenAI as a nonprofit was to put the technology at arm’s length from investors because they knew investors would exploit it in a way that would make this technology — which they thought was very dangerous — actually live up to that potential danger.

So I wanted to talk to him about the decision-making process behind that. And he was very forthcoming about that being the explicit reason why OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. They put a lot of........

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