Sam wrote the letter below to our employees and stakeholders about why we are so excited for this new direction.
God. Sam Altman didnât get to do what he wanted, and now weâre supposed to believe heâs âexcitedâ? This corporate spin is driving me crazy!
But, that aside, Iâm glad OpenAI has backed down, possibly because the Attorney General of Delaware or California, or both of them, told OpenAI they would block Samâs attempt to break the OpenAI company free from the non-profitâs control.
It seems more likely to me that OpenAI gave up because they had to give up, although this blog post is trying to spin it as if they changed their minds (which I doubt really happened).
Truly a brash move to try to betray the non-profit.
Once again Sam is throwing out gigantic numbers for the amounts of capital he theoretically wants to raise:
We want to be able to operate and get resources in such a way that we can make our services broadly available to all of humanity, which currently requires hundreds of billions of dollars and may eventually require trillions of dollars.
I wonder if his reasoning is that everyone in the world will use ChatGPT, so he multiplies the hardware cost of running one instance of GPT-5 by the world population (8.2 billion), and then adjusts down for utilization. (People gotta sleep and canât use ChatGPT all day! Although maybe theyâll run deep research overnight.)
Looks like the lede was buried:
Instead of our current complex capped-profit structureâwhich made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesnât in a world of many great AGI companiesâwe are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale, but a change of structure to something simpler.
The nonprofit will continue to control the PBC, and will become a big shareholder in the PBC, in an amount supported by independent financial advisors, giving the nonprofit resources to support programs so AI can benefit many different communities, consistent with the mission.
At first, I thought this meant the non-profit will go from owning 51% of the company (or whatever it is) to a much smaller percentage. But I tried to confirm this and found an article that claims the OpenAI non-profit only owns 2% of the OpenAI company. I donât know whether thatâs true. I canât find clear information on the size of the non-profitâs ownership stake.
God. Sam Altman didnât get to do what he wanted, and now weâre supposed to believe heâs âexcitedâ? This corporate spin is driving me crazy!
But, that aside, Iâm glad OpenAI has backed down, possibly because the Attorney General of Delaware or California, or both of them, told OpenAI they would block Samâs attempt to break the OpenAI company free from the non-profitâs control.
It seems more likely to me that OpenAI gave up because they had to give up, although this blog post is trying to spin it as if they changed their minds (which I doubt really happened).
Truly a brash move to try to betray the non-profit.
Once again Sam is throwing out gigantic numbers for the amounts of capital he theoretically wants to raise:
I wonder if his reasoning is that everyone in the world will use ChatGPT, so he multiplies the hardware cost of running one instance of GPT-5 by the world population (8.2 billion), and then adjusts down for utilization. (People gotta sleep and canât use ChatGPT all day! Although maybe theyâll run deep research overnight.)
Looks like the lede was buried:
At first, I thought this meant the non-profit will go from owning 51% of the company (or whatever it is) to a much smaller percentage. But I tried to confirm this and found an article that claims the OpenAI non-profit only owns 2% of the OpenAI company. I donât know whether thatâs true. I canât find clear information on the size of the non-profitâs ownership stake.