Inside the Chaos at OpenAI

To truly understand the events of this past weekend--the shocking, sudden ousting of OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, arguably the avatar of the generative-AI revolution, followed by reports that the company was in talks to bring him back, and then yet another shocking revelation that he would start a new AI team at Microsoft instead--one must understand that OpenAI is not a technology company. It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to the creation of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that should benefit "humanity as a whole." In this conception, OpenAI would operate more like a research facility or a think tank. The company's charter bluntly states that OpenAI's "primary fiduciary duty is to humanity," not to investors or even employees. In 2019, OpenAI launched a subsidiary with a "capped profit" model that could raise money, attract top talent, and inevitably build commercial products.