I think it could have easily been predicted just from the initial announcements. You can't create a public charity simply from the donations of a few wealthy individuals. A public charity has to meet the public support test. A private foundation would be a better model but someone decided they didn't want to go that route. Maybe should have asked a non-profit lawyer?

Maybe the vision is to eventually bring UBI into it and cap earn outs. Not so wild given Sam’s world coin and his UBI efforts when he was YC president.

The public support test for public charities is a 5-year rolling average, so "eventually" won't help you. The idea of billionaires asking the public for donations to support their wacky ideas is actually quite humorous. Just make it a private foundation and follow the appropriate rules. Bill Gates manages to do it and he's a dinosaur.

Wishfully I hope there was some intent from the beginning on exposing the impossibility of this contradictory model to the world, so that a global audience can evaluate on how to improve our system to support a better future.

Exactly this. OpenAI was started for ostensibly the right reasons. But once they discovered something that would both 1) take a tremendous amount of compute power to scale and develop, and 2) could be heavily monetized, they choose the $ route and that point the mission was doomed, with the board members originally brought in to protect the mission holding their fingers in the dyke.

> is by definition poorly aligned

If OpenAI is struggling to hard with the corporate alignment problem, how are they going to tackle the outer and inner alignment problems?