(Bloomberg) — OpenAI is discussing giving Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman a 7% equity stake in the company and restructuring it into a for-profit venture, people familiar with the matter said, a major change that would mark the first time Altman has been given ownership in the artificial intelligence startup.
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The company is considering becoming a public benefit corporation, with a mission to generate profits and also help society, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The transition is still under discussion and no timetable has been set, one of the people said.
OpenAI is considering the changes amid an exodus of senior executives. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati announced Wednesday that she is 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, losing several executives and changing the structure of some of its teams.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization with the goal of creating artificial intelligence that was safe and beneficial to humanity. In keeping with those origins, Altman had not purchased any stock, stressing that the company was meant to benefit society at large and that it had plenty of money.
But as the business’s value soared, it became increasingly difficult to maintain those ideals. In 2019, the company created a for-profit subsidiary to help fund the high costs of developing AI models, and has since attracted billions of dollars in outside investment from Microsoft Corp. and others.
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OpenAI is currently working to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion valuation, which would make it one of the most valuable startups in the world, Bloomberg reported this month. That boost, plus the potential new stake, could add more than $10 billion to Altman’s net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, catapulting him into the ranks of the world’s richest people.
In a statement, a spokesperson said OpenAI remains “focused on building AI that benefits everyone,” adding that “the nonprofit 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 a continued financial stake in OpenAI’s success. Many investors favor the idea of a founder owning at least part of the companies he or she runs. Altman has also occasionally said in interviews that he wished he had taken equity so people would stop asking him about it. Reuters previously reported on OpenAI’s plan to restructure and give Altman equity for the first time.
In a statement on X, Murati said he was “stepping away because I wanted to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” 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 all of us personally.” He also said he would share more with employees about transition plans soon.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Murati does not yet have an exit date from the company. He is still speaking with OpenAI leadership about plans for his replacement, including a timeline. In the post, he wrote: “For now, my main focus is to do everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we have built.”
Representatives for OpenAI and Murati declined to provide further comment.
On Wednesday, many employees were surprised by the announcement of Murati's departure. On the company's internal Slack channel, several OpenAI employees responded to the news with a “WTF” emoji, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Murati, an Albanian-born, Dartmouth-educated engineer, has played a key role in leading major product launches including OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot, its DALL-E image generation software, and its recently released advanced voice mode that allows users to speak to 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 shown off but not yet released, was trained on 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 was ousted, Murati gained a higher profile when she was appointed interim CEO, but she quickly joined a group of executives pushing for Altman to be reinstated.
His departure marks the latest executive departure at 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 until 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, which she previously sent to the company’s employees, 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 around 1,700 employees, more than double the approximately 770 it had at the end of 2023.
Altman later announced additional changes to OpenAI’s leadership. In a memo to OpenAI that he also sent to X on Wednesday, he wrote that director of research 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 the company.
“OpenAI is doing and will continue to do amazing work and I am very optimistic about the future trajectory of the company and will support everyone,” he wrote.
Altman also named six existing employees who will now report directly to him, some in new roles, including Matt Knight as chief information security officer.
“Over the past year or so, I have spent most of my time 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 grow so fast and are so demanding,” Altman wrote. “Obviously, I’m not going to pretend that it’s natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we’re not a normal company.”
(Updated with possible increase in Altman's net worth in sixth paragraph.)
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