#OpenAI #BehindClosedDoors
"(Many of the sources in this piece requested anonymity in order to speak freely about OpenAI without fear of reprisal.)
(. . .)
When OpenAI was founded, the idea was to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity. To that end, the co-founders—who included Altman and Elon Musk—set the organization up as a nonprofit and pledged to share research with other institutions. Democratic participation in the technology’s development was a key principle, they agreed, hence the company’s name. But by the time I started covering the company in 2019, these ideals were eroding. OpenAI’s executives had realized that the path they wanted to take would demand extraordinary amounts of money. Both Musk and Altman tried to take over as CEO. Altman won out. Musk left the organization in early 2018 and took his money with him. To plug the hole, Altman reformulated OpenAI’s legal structure, creating a new 'capped-profit' arm within the nonprofit to raise more capital.
Since then, I’ve tracked OpenAI’s evolution through interviews with more than 90 current and former employees, including executives and contractors. The company declined my repeated interview requests and questions over the course of working on my book about it, which this story is adapted from; it did not reply when I reached out one more time before the article was published. (OpenAI also has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic.)"
https://archive.is/LvBFI