“We made the decision for the nonprofit to stay in control after hearing from civic leaders and having discussions with the offices of the Attorneys General of California and Delaware,” said CEO Sam Altman in a letter to employees.
Altman and the chair of OpenAI’s nonprofit board, Bret Taylor, said the board made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of OpenAI. The nonprofit already has a for-profit arm, but that arm will be converted into a public benefit corporation “that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission,” Taylor said.
OpenAI’s co-founders, including Altman and Tesla CEO Musk, originally started it as a nonprofit research laboratory on a mission to safely build what’s known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, for humanity’s benefit. Nearly a decade later, OpenAI has reported its market value as $300 billion and counts 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT, its flagship product.
Easy decision to make when they are nowhere near ever turning a profit.
Is this likely to affect investment on them? I ask because it’s surprising to me that they lose $5b a year and now can’t follow a path to proper profitability, unless I’m understanding not for profit wrong.
There are strong competitors out there spending less and I reckon that their top of the line AI is not much better than DeepSeek’s or Anthropic’s and DeepSeek alone is trained at a fraction of the cost. Why would someone continue investing on OpenAI ?
Tax-avoidance?
I think they’re losing tons of money even on their $200/month plan. Last year they projected to lose like $5 billion. They just picked pricing arbitrarily I don’t see how they will turn a profit anytime soon.
They can’t charge enough to profit. If they raise the price beyond (or even up to) their cost per query, no one would subscribe.
I think its just never being able to pay back the immense investment.
Like how much went into chatgpt, and how much does it make?
I’m so sick of this AI nonsense. The internet did not need a new source of bullshit.
/Nelson
