Sarah Hirshander

2024, OpenAI decided that they wanted to completely like disentangle themselves from these nonprofit routes.

So they no longer wanted this cat profit model where investors could only get a certain amount of, you know, their investment back.

They wanted to be able to raise as much money as they wanted, and they wanted to be able to kind of behave like any other sort of for-profit AI company would.

They were eventually able to come up with sort of a deal with the Attorney General of California, which is where the company was based, that split OpenAI formally into like two arms.

One is like the corporation, an OpenAI corporation that may eventually go public, and the other is this new philanthropy, which is basically the original non-profit

that is now like still the parent umbrella organization of OpenAI, the company, but it also has these new responsibilities.

Basically, the philanthropy has two jobs.

One is to do grant making, so like giving money to other charities.

The other one is to do oversight over OpenAI, the company.

And then on the side of sort of oversight,

We haven't at least publicly seen the OpenAI Foundation now that it has this sort of formalized role via this deal with the attorney general.

We haven't seen them really step up in a different way, at least not yet.

I don't think they would identify as not being a touchy feely for a good operation.

I think they're actually trying very hard to still appear that way.

And I don't want to be too cynical here.

This whole deal is like super, super new.

So it is possible that we'll be seeing a lot of changes coming in the next year or two.

But I think at least so far this year, OpenAI has made a lot of headlines because of its deal with the Pentagon and the way that it's behaved in these negotiations.

And its competitor, Anthropic, which was actually founded by former OpenAI employees who were disgruntled about some of OpenAI's decisions about converting from the nonprofit.

OpenAI has come across as the company that was more willing to negotiate with the Pentagon in a different way than Anthropic was.