Sam Altman told OpenAI's staff in a recent company-wide meeting that the startup's complex non-profit corporate structure is set to change — likely sometime next year.
Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, touched on the impending changes in one of his weekly meetings with the entire staff, where employees are free to ask him questions in real-time, according to two people familiar with the exchange. He admitted that the company had effectively outgrown its convoluted structure, wherein a nonprofit arm is in control of a for-profit arm, which itself has control of a holding company, which controls another for-profit entity. That last for profit entity is what outside investors like Microsoft are putting billions of dollars of investment into. Altman has admitted OpenAI’s structure is “unusual,” saying last year it was done intentionally “because AI is an unusual technology.”
