Open AI began as a nonprofit research lab because its founders didn’t think artificial intelligence should be pioneered by commercial firms. It needed to be developed by an organization, as Open AI’s charter puts it, “acting in the best interests of humanity.” It experimented with having a not-for-profit board, responsible for ensuring the safe development of AI, overseeing a for-profit commercial business.
 
This uneasy relationship blew up over the last week when the board fired chief executive and co-founder Sam Altman. Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, called for the governance structure to change and offered Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman the chance to start a new AI-research group there. The majority of OpenAI’s staff threatened to resign. Altman returned to OpenAI and the organization’s board of directors is being overhauled.
 
The full story behind the drama has yet to be unveiled but begs the question: “Can one organization, or one person, maintain the brain of a scientist, the drive of a capitalist and the cautious heart of a regulatory agency?” as New York Times journalist David Brooks nicely put it in a column entitled "The Fight For The Soul Of AI."   Or, as journalist Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic, “will the money always win out?”
 
OpenAI’s internal struggle is not just about ensuring AI safety, although that, too, is a concern. It is about purpose.
 
Will AI be harnessed to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, such as combating climate change and eradicating disease? Or will the world allow a handful of monopolists to cause harms to society while building the equivalent of a new global pharma industry that controls access to breakthroughs and puts profits first?

Public money should be “invested ASAP in open research, as I said in my public address at OECD last week, to an extent that matches the research output levels achieved collectively by private AI research (OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and everybody else),” says serial AI startup founder Benoit Bergeret, Executive Director, ESSEC Metalab for Data, Technology and Society, Co-founder of Hub France AI and a member of the OECD Working Group On AI Futures."The rationale for this is the steering of research towards a for-profit agenda that I think should be countered. It would be a pity to see AI become the next Big Pharma. Public funding of AI research should not just be commensurate to private funding (at least in research productivity), it should also be open sourced and synchronized across borders."
 
Accelerating science could be the most economically and socially valuable use for artificial intelligence, Alistair Nolan, a senior policy analyst at the OECD wrote in a blog post this week. It could lead to benefits that private AI research isn’t interested in other than in a siloed fashion, possibly facilitating large scale funding of AI research, says Bergeret.
 
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