OpenAI’s board of directors’ abruptly firing CEO Sam Altman then bringing him back days later did not come out of nowhere. In fact, the boardroom drama represented the boiling over of tensions that have long simmered under the surface of the company. Following days of upheaval, Altman is again leading the company and a newly-formed board of directors is charting the path ahead, but the chaos at OpenAI can be traced back to the unusual way the company was structured. OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Altman, Elon Musk and others as a non-profit research lab. It was almost like an anti-Big Tech company; it would prioritize principles over profit. It wanted to, as OpenAI put it back then, develop AI tools that would “benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” But in 2018, two things happened: First, Musk quit the board of OpenAI after he said he invested $50 million, cutting the then-unknown company off from more of the entrepreneur’s crucial financial backing. And secondly, OpenAI’s leaders grew increasingly aware that developing and maintaining advanced artificial intelligence models required an immense amount of computing power, which was incredibly expensive. A year after Musk left, OpenAI created a for-profit arm. Technically, it is what’s known as a “capped profit” entity, which means investors’ possible profits are capped at a certain amount. Any remaining money is re-invested in the company.
Full opinion : Why CEO Sam Altman’s firing at ChatGPT maker Open AI was bound to happen.