Chapter 1: What is the promise of OpenAI's technology for humanity?
Chat GPT. You either love it or you hate it, am I right? You love it because it tells you why your back keeps doing that. You hate it because it uses a boatload of fresh water to do so. Or maybe you hate it because after OpenAI trained chat on centuries of humanity's creative labor, its leader, Sam Altman, said he wants to sell it right back to us.
We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for.
Cool! But wait! ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, has the potential to do tons of good, too. Turns out they've got $180 billion of charitable monies to give away to humanity, to help our cause. That's more than double what the Gates Foundation has to play with. OpenAI owes us $180 billion. But are we going to get it? On today's Explain from Vox. Here we go.
Chapter 2: How did OpenAI transition from nonprofit to for-profit?
Once upon a dismal day, Bob's ice cream van looked gloomy and gray. Although he had big ambitions, his socials lacked creative vision. That bad? Maybe vamp it up a tad? I have an idea. Bob launched Canva and got into gear. Create a video in the vampire theme and make it the funniest, I mean. It went viral. Bob's business, a revival.
Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at Canva.com. Hey, chat. Introduce Today Explained, the podcast.
Of course. Today Explained is a daily news podcast from Vox.
Each episode takes a single- No, just introduce it like you're introducing the show.
Chapter 3: What are the implications of OpenAI's $180 billion charitable commitment?
Like, this is Today Explained.
Ah, got it. This is Today Explained. Show me the money, chat. Sarah Hirshander from Vox is here to tell us where to start.
I think we would have to start back in 2015. So that's when OpenAI started. OpenAI began as a nonprofit. It began as this nonprofit AI lab founded by a few donors, including some extremely familiar names like Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
It's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way.
And they founded it as a nonprofit to develop AI in a way that is safe and that will benefit humanity. And they created it as a nonprofit lab instead of as a corporation or as like a for-profit startup, which is normally what we would see for this kind of thing, because they figured that this technology was going to be so transformative that we need to make sure there's no profit motive involved.
So nobody is going to make money off of what we're making.
The reason for our structure and the reason it's so weird is we think this technology, the benefits, the access to it, the governance of it, belongs to humanity as a whole. You should not, if this really works, it's quite a powerful technology and you should not trust one company and certainly not one person with it.
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Chapter 4: How does OpenAI's business model impact its original mission?
That was 2015. Fast forward a few years and AI starts getting a lot of buzz because of a new product called ChatGPT that OpenAI, the nonprofit lab, developed.
A new artificial intelligence tool is going viral for cranking out entire essays in a matter of seconds. We have about 100 million weekly active users now on ChatGPT. OpenAI is the most advanced and the most widely used AI platform in the world now.
So over time, OpenAI was saying, you know, we need a lot more money to be able to do this properly. It costs a lot of money to develop AI. It costs money to, like, hire people. The computing power, all of it costs a lot of money. So, like, we need investors. We can't just rely on donations and sort of the tax breaks that we get as a nonprofit to develop this stuff.
And so they created this like what's called like a capped profit subsidiary, which was like a little for profit arm that they could use to raise that money. It would still be under the control of the nonprofit as kind of like the umbrella parent organization. But they were able to raise some money to some extent.
A lot more money started pouring in, a lot more interest from investors started pouring in, and OpenAI was kind of struggling to reconcile the nonprofit part of their mission and the fact that they were becoming this enormous, one of the most well-known tech companies in the country.
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Chapter 5: What controversies surround OpenAI's dealings with the Pentagon?
So... 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.
Basically, what it wants to do is it wants to become a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation. And what that is, it's really just like a traditional corporation, but with some permission to do some public good, spend on public benefit. The whole raison d'être of OpenAI was to build artificial general intelligence, but for the good of humanity.
That's why initially it was a not-for-profit, but then suddenly they realized they needed a ton of money to be able to access the compute to build AGI, and therefore the awkwardness began.
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,
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Chapter 6: What are the legal challenges OpenAI faces regarding nonprofit laws?
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.
Can you tell me how OpenAI has sort of made it clear to the public that this is no longer like a touchy-feely for, you know, for the good of humanity operation? It feels like they've... I mean, I don't think I don't want to speak for them.
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.
Anthropic said it had two red lines that it would not cross. The Pentagon said that it was going to move to declare the company a supply chain risk.
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Chapter 7: How does the conflict of interest affect OpenAI's credibility?
And so OpenAI stepped in and said they're going to take this contract, but they want to have some safeguards.
Anthropic came across in that whole negotiation as a company that was willing to stand up against the Pentagon to put down some red lines where it did and did not want its technology to be used, whereas OpenAI simply did not come across that way. It's unclear exactly what those negotiations looked like, but that is at least sort of what the public has taken, I think, from those interactions.
And then we've also seen OpenAI get into a little bit of trouble because of some of its lobbying around AI safety. It's been opposed to different statewide AI safety measures, and they say that they do that because they want a federal safety measure. They're kind of collaborating with the with the Trump administration on.
But at the same time, I think a lot of critics have raised alarms about the fact that they've been opposed to those kinds of safety measures, which Anthropic, again, this competitor to OpenAI, has embraced. So...
I think at least from the public's perception, I'm not saying that this is everything that's going on within OpenAI, but the perception is certainly not that OpenAI is stepping forward in a real leadership way around what it means to be an ethical AI company, specifically given its nonprofit roots.
Okay, so that's what's been going on on the for-profit side. What about the not-for-profit side? Is there anything happening there with $180 billion of shares, I guess, in OpenAI?
So I spoke to a spokesperson at Opening Eye who says that there is a lot going on behind the scenes, but there is not that a lot that we've been seeing so far.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for OpenAI and its charitable efforts?
Like I said, we have seen that $40.5 million going to different community nonprofits, which is great. I talked to some of the nonprofits. They're wonderful. But I think $40.5 million is, I did the math here, like on the back of a napkin, but like it's about 0.02%. of $180 billion.
And while OpenAI has said that it will be giving, as an initial promise, $25 billion to charity, falling into two buckets. One is focused on scientific research and health, and one is focused on what they're calling AI resilience. We have no idea what that's actually going to look like. And again, I'm giving OpenAI the benefit of the doubt. This deal was made in October.
$180 billion is a lot of money. You almost don't want them to start giving away that much that quickly. Like, you want to see them slowly building up their team. And a really important thing to note is that the board of directors of the OpenAI Foundation is almost identical to the board of directors of OpenAI, the corporation. There is one... member of the foundation board that is different.
Again, that might change over the course of the year. But the fact that like the OpenAI Foundation doesn't have that sort of independent structure just yet has raised a lot of alarms.
You're saying the people who are influencing decisions on the for-profit side of OpenAI are the same people influencing decisions or a lack thereof on the not-for-profit side.
With the exception of one member, yes.
And when I asked OpenAI about this and sort of raised the alarm bells that a lot of people had about the idea that these board members could kind of put on a different hat when they're meeting about the foundation and when they're meeting about the corporation, you know, the answer was basically we have conflict of interest policies and they know how to do that.
Trust us. We're professionals.
Yeah, basically trust us, which... I think it raised a lot of doubts for a lot of the critics who've been skeptical about the restructuring.
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