You cannot make this up: “OpenAI’s Board of Directors is evaluating our corporate structure in order to best support the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI)1 benefits all of humanity, with three objectives”. Yes, a $157 billion company board is still “evaluating” its corporate structure!

OpenAI is in a mess because most of the founding partners are those who believe in the unalloyed supremacy of technology above all things. Yes, provided they can extend the Pythagorean postulation that the universe is numbers, and can pursue its practicalization in fixing market frictions, everything will fall into place.

Unfortunately, that is an illusion, and OpenAI is learning the hard way. If they had incorporated this company as a for-profit company, the generative AI pioneer will not be going through this paralysis. But that was not the case as they went non-profit, and now want to evolve, and morph, into another species of companies. Unfortunately, that is not an easy thing, because the law is clear: if you are to dissolve that non-profit, the assets move to another non-profit or to the state for public good.

Of course, how do you hand over $157 billion to the government? That is why the Board is still “evaluating” because they have no clear answers. When they are done, a simple suit will bring them to order. Yes, the creator of ChatGPT cannot use ChatGPT to discover the right corporate structure because that is above the pay-compute-grade of ChatGPT. But if they had asked a recent law graduate, they possibly might have been saved from this.  There is a reason we have Mastercard Foundation for Mastercard, Intel Foundation for Intel, etc.

Good People, respect lawyers because they serve as high priests on the altars of governments even if you are a tech prodigy