In a recent lawsuit filed in San Francisco by Elon Musk against OpenAI, Musk, one of the original founders of OpenAI that subsequently resigned from the organization, alleges that the maker of ChatGPT has violated their original contract as a nonprofit venture with the goal of developing AI for the benefit of humanity. Yet today, especially with its deep relationship with companies such as Microsoft, OpenAI is flagrantly pursuing profit, shirking the humanitarian mission Elon Musk claims he initially invested in. Worse, the failed ouster of Sam Altman in November 2023 showed that the cautious side of OpenAI is lost. Now, for an organization whose purported initial mission was to advance society through artificial intelligence, it may very well be placing society in much greater danger. This is a clear example of a project that went astray and did not take the values and considerations of its major stakeholder, Elon Musk, into consideration.
Organizations and large-scale projects can go awry for many reasons. At one extreme, perhaps OpenAI always had a master hidden agenda to advance a technology with profit motives while announcing its altruistic mission of advancing society. Founded in 2015, OpenAI’s publicly stated motive was pure – developing “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence (OpenAI, 2018). But in 2019, with its partnership with Microsoft and a huge cash infusion of $1 billion, OpenAI transitioned to a hybrid company, a capped for-profit venture in which the profit is capped at 100 times any investment. This allows the organization’s for-profit subsidiary, Open AI Global LLC, to legally attract investments from others. It also allows OpenAI to distribute equity to its employees, which in a high-tech industry, is arguably essential to attract the best talent.