Openai has reached a new tentative agreement with Microsoft and announced that its non-profit organization, which technically controls its business, will now be granted a $100 billion equity stake in its non-profit corporation.
The maker of Chatgpt said it has reached a new non-disclosure agreement with its long-time partner Microsoft for the “next phase of our partnership.”
The announcements Thursday included few details about these new measures. Openai’s proposed changes to its corporate structure have sparked scrutiny from regulators, competitors and authorities about the impact of artificial intelligence.
Openai was founded as a non-profit in 2015, and its non-profit board continued to control the non-profit subsidiary that now develops and sells its own AI products. It is unclear whether the $100 billion equity stake that the non-profit will receive as part of this announcement is a controlling stake in the company.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said last week that his office is investigating Openai’s proposed restructuring of its finances and management.
He and Delaware Attorney General Katie Jennings also sent the company a letter expressing concerns about Chatgpt’s security after meeting with Openai’s legal team early last week in Delaware, where Openai is incorporated.
“Together, we are particularly concerned that Openai, as a nonprofit, continues to have a security mission front and center,” Bonta said in a statement last week.
Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in Openai in 2019, and the two companies later formed an agreement that made Microsoft the exclusive provider of the computing power needed to build Openai’s technology. In turn, Microsoft has heavily leveraged ChatGpt’s technology to improve its own AI products.
The two companies announced on January 21 that they were changing that arrangement, allowing the smaller company to build its own computing power, “primarily for model research and training.” This coincided with Openai’s announcements of a partnership with Oracle to build a massive new data center in Abilene, Texas.
But other parts of its agreement with Microsoft remained up in the air as the two companies seemed to drift further apart. Their joint statement on Thursday said they were still “actively working to finalize the terms of the agreement in a definitive agreement.” Both companies declined to comment further.
OpenAI had given its nonprofit board of directors — whose members now include a former U.S. Treasury secretary — the responsibility of deciding when its AI systems have reached the point where they “outperform humans at the most economically valuable work,” a concept known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
Such an achievement, under previous agreements, would deprive Microsoft of the right to commercialize such a system, as the terms “apply only to pre-AGI technologies.”
Openai’s corporate structure and nonprofit mission are also the subject of a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk , who helped found the nonprofit research lab and provided initial funding. Musk’s suit seeks to prevent Openai from taking control of the company from its nonprofit organization, claiming it has betrayed its promise to develop AI for the benefit of humanity.
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