I think this is missing the main point that Musk was never the owner of OpenAI, neither was Sam, nor the employees. The owners are the American people. I presume Musk got a tax rebate from his donation, courtesy of the taxpayer; so did every other donor.
The fact is, OpenAI was a non-profit belonging to the public and it was appropriated by the donors... Who already got their tax cuts.
This is setting a precedent that if you donate a certain amount of money to a charity, you can later convert it to a for-profit and claim to be an owner of the charity... On the basis of 'donations' which you got a tax rebate from. Very convenient.
OpenAI donors should have created a new, separate, for-profit entity completely distinct from OpenAI, with a different name, poached the original employees, implemented all the logic from scratch, collected all the training data from scratch... This would have been correct. Basically what Anthropic did seems more like the correct way.
OpenAI Foundation is a corporation established in Delaware. It has received it's 501(c)3 status from the IRS which means donations are deductible to the fullest extent of the law (or some such; it's been a long time since I've had to write that). The American people do not own the foundation.
As for the OpenAI that is a public benefits corporation, I know nothing about all the ins and outs of that type of corporation.
I don't understand your reasoning here. You seem to be suggesting that non-profits are owned by the American people?
Is there some part of this that I'm missing where this was true of OpenAI at some point?
I'm using the term 'owners' loosely here, but this is a much more reasonable interpretation than the interpretation that the donors are the owners.
I don't think you understand how non-profits work. Essentially they are exactly the same as for-profits, except they can't issue dividends. Ownership works exactly the same as for-profit companies.
A cynical take is that non-profits are for-salary; they still pay their owners, just using other means.
edit: no, my bad, apparently I misunderstood how non-profits work in the USA. Thanks for the correction :)
This is not correct. jongjong is correct that a nonprofit does not have owners in the sense that a for-profit has owners. Nonprofits are dedicated to their mission, and are run by a board of directors.
You cannot have a % ownership in a nonprofit because its resources must be used exclusively to carry out its mission. You could have a % control in its decision making process.
They're correct about the equity ownership bit, but not in their argument that there's an implicit public claim of control.
The intellectual property (code, data) was transferred from the nonprofit to the for-profit for about $60M, which is what an independent firm hired to assess the value said the IP was worth in late 2018 / early 2019. The nonprofit itself was never converted to a for-profit, and indeed remains a nonprofit to this day.
The $60M in IP has grown to about a $200B stake in the OpenAI for-profit.