OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit

By March 2019, OpenAI shed its non-profit status and set up a "capped profit" sector, in which the company could now receive investments and would provide investors with profit capped at 100 times their investment. The company's decision was likely a result of its desire to compete with Big Tech rivals like Google and ended up receiving a $1 billion investment shortly after from Microsoft. In the blog post announcing the formation of a for-profit company, OpenAI continued to use the same language we see today, declaring its mission to "ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity." As Motherboard wrote when the news was first announced, it's incredibly difficult to believe that venture capitalists can save humanity when their main goal is profit.