OpenAI considers transition to a for-profit model; CTO leaves the company

(Bloomberg) — OpenAI is considering becoming a for-profit company and giving Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman a stake in the AI ​​startup for the first time, people familiar with the matter said.

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One scenario being discussed is converting to a B Corp, a type of for-profit company that also aims to benefit society, said the people, who asked not to be identified and disclosed private information. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the restructuring plans.

OpenAI is considering these changes amid an exodus of executives. Mira Murati announced on Wednesday that she is leaving the company, a surprise move that marks the startup's latest high-profile departure.

The company has been in a state of upheaval since last November, when it briefly fired and then rehired CEO Sam Altman. In the months that followed, OpenAI lost several executives and restructured some of its teams.

In a statement to X, Murati said she was “stepping down because I want to create time and space for my own exploration.” In his response, Altman expressed his “great gratitude” for what Murati has helped the company achieve, writing, “It's hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to all of us personally.” He also said he would tell employees more about the transition plans soon.

Representatives from OpenAI and Murati declined to comment beyond the posts.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization with the goal of developing artificial intelligence that is safe and useful for humanity. The company set up a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 to finance the high costs of developing AI models and has since attracted billions in outside investment from Microsoft Corp. and others. This month, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is currently working to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.

On Wednesday, many employees reacted with shock to the announcement of Murati's departure. On the company's internal Slack channel, several OpenAI employees reacted to the news with a “WTF” emoji, according to a person familiar with the matter.

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Murati, an Albanian-born, Dartmouth-educated engineer, has played a key role in overseeing major product releases, including OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT, its image generation software DALL-E, and its recently released enhanced speech mode, which allows users to talk to ChatGPT in virtually real time.

In the spring, Murati came under fire for saying in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that she was unsure whether Sora, a text-to-video generator that OpenAI has unveiled but not yet released, was trained using user-generated videos from YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Such use of YouTube content would be a violation of the platform's terms of service, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan later told Bloomberg.

After Altman's ouster, Murati rose to prominence when she was appointed interim CEO – but she soon joined a group of executives who campaigned for Altman's reinstatement.

Their departures are the latest executive departures since Altman was fired and rehired last year. Ilya Sutskever, the company's chief scientist, left in May. In August, co-founder Greg Brockman said he would go on leave until the end of the year, and researcher John Schulman moved to AI competitor Anthropic. The departures leave only two members of OpenAI's original founding team at the company: Altman and Wojciech Zaremba.

In her post on X, the text of which she had previously sent to employees at the company, Murati said she was grateful to have worked with the OpenAI team. “Together, we have pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding to improve human well-being,” she wrote.

(Updated with context from the first paragraph.)

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