OpenAI discusses giving Sam Altman 7% stake in for-profit transition
OPENAI is discussing giving chief executive officer Sam Altman a 7 per cent equity stake in the company and restructuring to become a for-profit business, sources familiar with the matter said, a major shift that would mark the first time Altman is granted ownership in the artificial intelligence (AI) startup.
The company is considering becoming a public benefit corporation, tasked with turning a profit and also helping society, said the sources, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The transition is still under discussion and a timeline has not been determined, one of the sources said. In a statement, a spokesperson said OpenAI remains “focused on building AI that benefits everyone”, and added: “The non-profit is core to our mission and will continue to exist.”
OpenAI is mulling these changes against the backdrop of an exodus of senior managers. Mira Murati said on Wednesday (Sep 25) she is leaving, a surprise move that marks the latest high-profile departure from the startup. In the months after it suddenly fired and then rehired Altman last year, OpenAI has been in a state of flux – losing multiple managers and shifting the structure of some of its teams.
Murati said she was “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration”. In response, Altman expressed “tremendous gratitude” for Murati’s contributions, writing, “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally.” He also said that he would share more with employees about transition plans soon.
Murati does not yet have an exit date at the company, according to a source familiar with the matter. She is still speaking with OpenAI’s leadership about plans for her replacement, including the timeline. “For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we have built,” she said.
Representatives for OpenAI and Murati declined to provide further comment.
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OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research organisation with the goal of building AI that would be safe and beneficial to humanity. The company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 in order to help fund the high costs of AI model development, and has since drawn billions in outside investment from Microsoft and others. This month, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is currently working to raise US$6.5 billion at a US$150 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.
In keeping with the company’s non-profit origins, Altman had famously not taken equity, stressing that the company was meant to broadly benefit society, and that he had enough money. But he has also occasionally said that he wished he had taken equity so that people would stop asking him about it.
On Wednesday, many employees were shocked by the announcement of Murati’s departure. On the company’s internal Slack channel, multiple OpenAI employees responded to the news with a “WTF” emoji, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Murati, an Albanian-born Dartmouth-educated engineer, played a key role in shepherding major product releases, including OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot, its DALL-E image generation software, and its recently released advanced voice mode that lets users talk to ChatGPT in essentially real-time.
This spring, Murati came under fire for saying in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that she was not sure whether Sora, a text-to-video generator that OpenAI has showed off but not yet released, was trained on user-generated videos from YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Such use of YouTube content would be an infraction of the platform’s terms of service, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan later said.
After Altman’s ouster, Murati gained a higher profile when she was appointed as interim CEO – but she quickly joined a group of executives pushing for Altman to be reinstated.
Her departure marks the latest executive exit at OpenAI since Altman’s firing and rehiring last year. Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist, left in May. In August, co-founder Greg Brockman said he would go on leave until the end of the year and researcher John Schulman left for AI rival Anthropic. The departures leave only two members of OpenAI’s original founding team at the startup: Altman and Wojciech Zaremba.
In her post on X, the text of which she earlier sent to employees at the company, Murati said she was grateful to have worked with the OpenAI team. “Together we have pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding in our quest to improve human well-being,” she said. BLOOMBERG
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