OpenAI executives rattled by campaigns to derail for-profit restructuring
wsj.com
wsj.com
The branding also helps position the employees and the ceo as “for humanity” rather than for profit. This has non tangible benefits.
But what did they really think would happen? Surely they would need funding but who would risk funding this kind of company where the returns are extremely high risk?
If it has to remain non profit, could the state fund OpenAI instead?
Despite already using high data, high computation, low complexity solvers (I.e. deep learning), the Bitter Lesson continued to surprise!
At the point it became clear scale of data, parameters & compute were the top three (!) high bits for success, they would have realized (correctly) that staying a pure non-profit would rapidly make them irrelevant.
Setting aside any personal greed by anyone, the problem is still there.
Staying or reverting to a pure non-profit doesn’t provide the resources the non-profit’s mission requires.
Which was to have real safety impact at the cutting edge, not just publish safety related papers from the gallery.
TLDR; They absolutely need profits as part of their structure, or their non-profit mission is unattainable. But all the outside pressure they are getting as they adapt, is necessary to ensure the new structure remains committed to the mission.