Tech

OpenAI Sells Out. And We All Lose.

Joan Westenberg

Sep 26, 2024 — 4 min read

OpenAI was supposed to save humanity from dangerous AI. Now, it’s chasing billions in investor returns. Who’s looking out for us?

OpenAI, arguably the household name in AI research and development, is at a crossroads.

The company that brought us ChatGPT is prepping for dramatic shift, from its non-profit roots to a fully commercial enterprise, in a move that will redefine the commercial nature of artificial intelligence.

To put it bluntly, OpenAI is open for business, and business is booming.

OpenAI's Complex Structure

To say OpenAI has a complex organizational structure is like saying Sam Altman is “a bit polarising.”

Founded in 2015 as a home for ethical and transparent AI development (lol), OpenAI positioned itself as a non-profit research laboratory. Its mission was clear: to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. It was a lofty, if wildly pretentious goal that attracted some of the brightest minds in the field, all united under the banner of responsible AI development.

But noble intentions rarely stay that way when they meet the reality of financial gain. In 2019, OpenAI introduced a "capped-profit" subsidiary designed to attract investment while ostensibly maintaining its commitment to the greater good. The cap on investor returns was set at 100 times their investment, a figure so astronomical that The Observer quipped it "might as well not exist."

Infinite Leverage

We revere the tangible above all else — money, technology, and measurable connections. These are the things we can see, touch, quantify, and display as proof of our progress and success. We dedicate ourselves to chasing traditional forms of leverage. We work tirelessly to accumulate wealth, believing it will grant us

Don’t Confuse Volume with Truth

The human species isn’t on a steady decline into stupidity—it just feels that way. Why? because now everyone has a microphone. A few decades ago, the loudest voices in the room were filtered by effort, editors, publishers, broadcasters, academics, or sometimes just the looming threat of social ostracization.

Rebel Optimism: How We Thrive in a Broken World

The world is crumbling in real time—I’m not here to argue that point. We’ve got rising seas swallowing cities, political chaos run by arsonist clowns with their pants on fire trying to set everything else alight, inequality so vast it feels cosmic, wars driven by fragile egos

"World War 3" is Not Inevitable: How Sequential Thinking Shapes Our Perception of Conflict

The moment we started numbering world wars like entries in a blockbuster movie franchise, we set ourselves up for failure. The war of 1914 was called The Great War at the time. But when we renamed it “World War I,” it was both a historical label and an unintentional promise.