(Bloomberg) — OpenAI is discussing giving CEO Sam Altman a 7% stake in the company and restructuring the company into a profitable business, people with knowledge of the matter said. It’s a major move and would mark Altman’s first time owning the artificial intelligence startup.
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The company is considering becoming a public benefit corporation, charged with making a profit and helping society, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The transition is still under discussion and no timeline has been set, one of the people said.
OpenAI is considering the changes against the backdrop of an exodus of senior leaders. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said Wednesday she was leaving, a surprise move that marks the latest high-profile departure from the startup. In the months since it abruptly fired and then rehired Altman last year, OpenAI has been in a state of flux, shedding several executives and reorganizing some teams.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization with the goal of building artificial intelligence that would be safe and useful to humanity. In keeping with that origin, Altman did not take any stock, stressing that the company was intended to benefit society broadly and that he had enough money.
But as the company’s value rose, it became harder and harder to maintain those ideals. In 2019, the company created a for-profit subsidiary to help finance the high costs of developing AI models, and it has since attracted billions in outside investment from Microsoft Corp. and others.
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OpenAI is currently seeking to raise $6.5 billion at a valuation of $150 billion, which would make it one of the most valuable startups in the world, Bloomberg reported this month. That boost on top of the potential new equity could add more than $10 billion to Altman’s net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, putting him among the world’s richest people.
In a statement, a spokesperson said OpenAI “remains focused on building AI that benefits everyone,” adding, “the nonprofit organization is core to our mission and will continue to exist.”
The potential equity stake, which is still under negotiation and could change or not materialize, would give Altman an ongoing financial stake in OpenAI’s success. Many investors like the idea of a founder owning at least a portion of the companies they run. Altman has also said in interviews on occasion that he wishes he had taken equity so people wouldn’t ask him about it anymore. Reuters previously reported on OpenAI’s plan to restructure and give Altman equity for the first time.
In a statement to X, Murati said she was “stepping back because I wanted to create the time and space to do my own research.” In response, Altman expressed “tremendous gratitude” for Murati’s contributions, 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 share more about transition plans with employees soon.
Murati does not yet have an exit date from the company, a source said. She is still speaking with OpenAI leadership about plans for her replacement, including a timeline. In the post, she wrote: “For now, my primary focus is on doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition while maintaining the momentum we have built.”
Representatives for OpenAI and Murati declined to comment further.
On Wednesday, many employees were shocked by the announcement of Murati’s departure. In 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.
Murati, an Albanian-born engineer who studied at Dartmouth, has been instrumental in shepherding major product releases including OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot, the DALL-E image generation software, and the recently released Advanced Voice Mode that lets users converse with ChatGPT in near real-time.
This spring, Murati came under fire for saying in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that she wasn’t sure whether Sora, a text-to-video generator that OpenAI has demonstrated but not yet released, had been trained on user-generated videos from YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Such use of YouTube content would violate the platform’s terms of service, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan later told Bloomberg.
After Altman was fired, Murati rose to prominence when she was appointed interim CEO, but she soon joined a group of executives pushing for Altman to be reinstated.
Her departure marks the latest executive departure from OpenAI 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 take a leave of absence through the end of the year, and researcher John Schulman left for AI rival Anthropic. The departures leave just two members of OpenAI’s original founding team at the startup: Altman and Wojciech Zaremba.
In her post on X, the text of which she previously sent to employees of the company, Murati said she was grateful to have worked with the OpenAI team. “Together, we have pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding in our quest to improve human well-being,” she wrote.
The company currently has about 1,700 employees, more than double the approximately 770 it had at the end of 2023.
Altman subsequently announced additional changes to OpenAI’s leadership. In a memo to OpenAI that he also posted on X on Wednesday, he wrote that Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew is leaving, along with Barret Zoph, a vice president of research who worked on products like ChatGPT.
In his own post on X, Zoph said it was a “very difficult decision” to leave and that he plans to explore “new opportunities” outside of the company.
“OpenAI is doing and will continue to do incredible work and I am very optimistic about the future direction of the company and will continue to encourage everyone,” he wrote.
Altman also named six existing employees who report directly to him, some in new roles, including Matt Knight as Chief Information Security Officer.
“I have spent most of my time over the past year or so on the non-technical parts of our organization; I now look forward to spending most of my time on the technical and product parts of the company,” the CEO wrote, adding that there will be an all-staff meeting on Thursday to answer employee questions.
“Leadership changes are a natural part of business, especially businesses that are growing so quickly and are so demanding,” Altman wrote. “I won’t pretend that it’s natural that this is so abrupt, but we’re not a normal business.”
(The sixth paragraph mentions a possible increase in Altman’s wealth.)
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