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Sam Altman raises, for the first time, the idea of converting OpenAI into a for-profit. Frames it around the inability of the nonprofit to compete on compensation and compute.

SA
Sam Altman<sam@openai.com>
toElonccGreg, Ilya
Thu, Apr 27, 2017, 7:18 PM UTC

Elon — Greg, Ilya and I have been talking. The nonprofit structure is making it really hard to compete with DeepMind and the in-house labs at Google and Facebook. We think we may need to consider a for-profit structure.

Specifically: a holding company / capped-profit subsidiary. Investors would get a return up to a multiple cap; the nonprofit would still own the residual, and the mission would still control the entity.

This is a big change so I wanted to flag it before our meeting tomorrow.

Sam

EM
Elon Musk<elon@teslamotors.com>
toSamccGreg, Ilya
Thu, Apr 27, 2017, 8:01 PM UTC

We can discuss but I want to be very clear: the entity that controls AGI cannot be Sam Altman. It also cannot be a small group of investors who happen to be friends of Sam.

If we're going to do a for-profit it needs to be done with serious adult oversight.

Elon