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Can someone more knowledgeable tell me how to square this with the news that OpenAI is trying to spin up a for-profit arm? Are they afraid of layoffs or are they smelling things turning rotten?

I mean may be investors are just stupid which really makes me ponder how life would just be better if resources were allocated differently in society.

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> Can someone more knowledgeable tell me how to square this with the news that OpenAI is trying to spin up a for-profit arm? Are they afraid of layoffs or are they smelling things turning rotten?

OpenAI spun up the for-profit arm called OpenAI Global, LLC in 2019 [1] shortly after GPT2. If you pay for ChatGPT plus or for the API, that's where your money has been going.

The big change is that they want to allow the for-profit arm to issue shares to other people and investors. Until now, the for-profit arm has been owned and controlled by the nonprofit's holding company [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#2019:_Transition_from_n...

[2] https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/4200df88-28fe-4212... from https://openai.com/our-structure/

I'm not more knowledgeable, but can't you square it with the fact that a for-profit arm is a new direction, and when organizations make big structural changes like this there are often people inside the org who disagree and decide to leave?

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