Operai said Monday that he was restructuring as a public benefit corporation, which allows the non -profit that controls Openi to preserve his control over the company.
The decision is a victory for Openai critics, including one of the founders, Elon Musk, who complained that the company was too focused on profits and had abandoned its early plan to build artificial intelligence systems with security in mind.
The changes announced on Monday are the last years of corporate drama for what many consider the company of the most influential in the world. Chatgpt Chatbot of OpenAI, launched at the end of 2022, was a night success that sent to the rest of the technology industry. In just a few years, Tech larger companies have spent billions in their own AI projects, with hundreds of billions more planned for this decade.
Mr. Musk, who now directs his own AI company, sued Openai for plans that he was establishing to change his corporate structure of an unorthodox system that cools a non -profit supervision of a profit company. But he was not the only critic of Openai’s planned changes. General prosecutors in California, where OpenAi is based, and in Delaware, where he was created legal, also said they were monitoring their restructuring. The California Attorney Office, Rob Bonta, said in a statement that he was reviewing the new OpenAI plan.
And in recent weeks, a series of academics from the legal community and experts such as Geoffrey Hinton, who won a Nobel Prize last year for their pioneering research of AI, also publicly expressed a group about Bankai’s direction.
The argument about how OpenI should be structured and in what their priorities should be tribute to a fundamental question about artificial intelligence: Should researchers hurry to develop new and more powerful systems? Or should the theoretical risk that AI presents to humanity to inform everything that these researchers create?
Operai began in 2015 with that tension in mind.
Sam Altman, Executive Director of OpenAI, created the Artificial Intelligence Organization with several other Figures by Silicon Valley as a non -profit organization at the end of 2015. In 2018, after Musk left in a power struggle, Altman attached Openai to a profit company to be able to raise the thousands of millions of dollars needed to build technologies of AI.
But the lack of profit withdrew their grip in a structure that some saw as albatros of the company’s growth. Last year, Mr. Altman and his company begged a plan to change control of the lack of profit to OpenI investors, to be more attractive to the subject.
Shortly after, Mr. Musk Sed Openai, Mr. Altman and another founder, Greg Brockman, in a federal court, claiming that they were putting the commercial interests of the company and AI ahead of the public good.
This year, Mr. Musk and a consortium of investors also offered to buy the assets of the lack of profit that Openai controls for more than $ 97 billion. The Board of Directors of Openai rejected the offer.
Now, the company has not retreated from the plan to keep control of the lack of profit. It is not clear if the new structure, which allows the non -profit organization to be Openai’s largest shareholder, will affect Mr. Musk’s demand.
A public benefits corporation is often described as an organization designed to create public and social good and allows strangers to invest in the same way they invest in other companies.
“I am very happy to have made the decision that the lack of profit maintain control,” Altman Duration said a press conference. He added that the new change “prepares us to have a more understandable structure to do things than a company like ours has to do.”
Operai said he was still negotiating the participation of the non -profit organization in the new corporation and that the non -profit organization would choose the members of the Board of the new entity.
“I thank me that the Board seems to have worked with the regulators and that the non -profit organization will maintain control,” said Jill R. Horwitz, a law professor at the University of Northwestern who specializes in non -profit organizations. “But we still don’t know what control means.”
The Japanese conglomerate Softbank recently led a financing round of $ 40 billion in Operai that values the company at $ 300 billion. If this change is not complete for the end of the year, SoftBank will have the option to reduce your total contribution to $ 20 billion, said a person familiar with the last investment agreement.
Altman said he was sure that the financing would not be reduced.
“We made the decision that the lack of profit of retaining OpenI control after listening to civic leaders and participating in a constructive dialogue with the offices of the Attorney General of Delaware and the Attorney General of California,” said the president of OpenII.
(The New York Times has sued Openai and his partner, Microsoft, accusing the issue of copyright infringement regarding the content of news related to AI systems. Openai and Microsoft have denied those statements).
Marc Toberoff, the lawyer who supervises Mr. Musk’s demand, said in a statement that the changes in OpenAi were a “transparent elusive” that did not address if the charitable assets will be used to benefit Mr. Altman and OpenAi’s investors.
“The founding mission is still betrayed,” said Toboff.
