OpenAI Completes Shift Into For-Profit Company

OpenAI has now finished converting itself into a for-profit public benefit corporation, while keeping a mission-led foundation on top, in what may be the most important restructuring so far in the commercial AI race.

Started As Non-Profit

OpenAI was originally founded (back in 2015) as a non-profit research lab with a stated mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AI), i.e., AI that is smarter than humans across a wide range of tasks, benefits all of humanity. The company says that mission still applies and what has just been changed is really the legal and financial structure used to pursue it.