OpenAI's Boardroom Drama Could Mess Up Your Future

In June I had a conversation with chief scientist Ilya Sutskever at OpenAI's headquarters, as I reported out WIRED's October cover story. Among the topics we discussed was the unusual structure of the company. OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab whose mission was to develop artificial intelligence on par or beyond human level--termed artificial general intelligence or AGI--in a safe way. The company discovered a promising path in large language models that generate strikingly fluid text, but developing and implementing those models required huge amounts of computing infrastructure and mountains of cash. This led OpenAI to create a commercial entity to draw outside investors, and it netted a major partner: Microsoft. Virtually everyone in the company worked for this new for-profit arm.