The ChatGPT developer's new board of directors and its briefly fired but now-restored CEO, Sam Altman, said last week that they're trying to fix the unusual corporate structure that allowed four board members to trigger a near-death experience for the company. The startup was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, but it develops AI inside a capped-profit subsidiary answerable to the nonprofit's board, which is charged with ensuring that the technology is "broadly beneficial" to humanity. To stabilize this unusual structure, OpenAI could take pointers from longer-lived companies with a similar arrangement--including introducing a second board to help balance its founding mission with its for-profit pursuit of returns for investors. OpenAI deferred comment for this story to new board chair Bret Taylor. The veteran tech executive told WIRED in a statement that the board is focused on overseeing an independent review of the recent crisis and enhancing governance.

In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a consumer-facing artificial intelligence tool that could hold a conversation with users, answer questions, and generate anything from poems to computer code to health advice. The initial technology was not perfect – it would sometimes "hallucinate", producing convincing but inaccurate information – but its potential generated enormous attention. A year later, ChatGPT's popularity has continued, with 100 million people using it on a weekly basis, and over 92% of Fortune 500 companies and several competitor firms looking to cash in or improve on the technology. But that's not why ChatGPT's creator, OpenAI, was in the news this week. Instead, OpenAI was the center of a fierce philosophical debate about what it means to develop artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity. To understand the current debate and its stakes requires going back to OpenAI's founding in December 2015.

The ascension of an insider CEO can be a bit underwhelming. When Satya Nadella took the helm of Microsoft in 2014, some employees and investors were disappointed. The search committee had spent months sifting through more than 100 potential leaders, looking for someone who could revive the spirit of innovation that had once defined the company. Along the way, some Wall Street analysts interpreted the fact that no clear external candidate was emerging to indicate that "Microsoft couldn't attract an appealing CEO after years of dwindling relevance," the Wall Street Journal reported. And then, on a frigid January day, they got a 22-year Microsoft veteran as CEO.