OpenAI's board doesn't run a business, they run a nonprofit with a mission oriented around safety and public benefit, not private profit.
It has a for-profit subsidiary, explicitly subordinated to the nonprofit's mission, as a funding mechanism, but being successful at bringing in money is only a net benefit if the method by which the funding is generated isn't more harmful to the mission than what it enables is beneficial.
So I guess they’d prefer not accomplishing their mission at all instead of only partially (and having to compromise/change parts of it)? Which is not unreasonable if you assume nobody else will ever be able to catch up with them…
However if their goal was indeed what you said they have failed miserably at it. They simply won’t have any say in what happens next because of this situation
The 10 billion in compute will get them reasonably far (and I don't see how Microsoft legally gets out of this, unless it said "you can't fire sam" in the contract).
That said I also wouldn't be surprised if Elon[1] jumps back into the fray somehow given how close he is to Ilya and that the change towards commercialization was what put him off openAI.
If so they’ll probably struggle meeting any obligations with no employees.
> change towards commercialization was what put him off openAI.
Right… you’re talking about Musk here?
Their goals are mitigating what they see as an existential risk to human civilization, and also delivering social benefit from a properly aligned version of the same technology posing the risk.
From that perspective, actively compromising the first part of the mission in the short term potentially renders longer-term financial viability and the second part of the mission irrelevant concerns.
But that’s it. The world will move on and at best they just delayed those “existential threats” by 6-12 months. If they thought this preferable to any form of compromise. Well.. that’s fine.
However I doubt this was even the primary reason of this whole conflict in the first place.
so much wrong in so few words.
"it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world"
This company is very different.
Yep, they will know become a real non profit.