Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: OpenAI Will Get A Bit More Normal

OpenAI

I have always had a dumb simple model of OpenAI’s nonprofit/capped-profit/for-profit structure:

1. There is a nonprofit organization that currently controls OpenAI, whose mission is to build “safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity.”
2. There is a for-profit company that employs the employees and raises the money and builds the artificial intelligence models and sells them to consumers and businesses.
3. The ownership structure of the for-profit company is complicated. Different investors (employees, venture capitalists, Microsoft Corp., etc.) are entitled to different cash flows from the company’s future profits. Until recently, every investor’s cash flows were capped ...