[l33tman]

It seems a bit weird to quietly hope that the money you put in an organization with the explicit goal of being a non-profit, would give you direct monetary returns though.. Maybe they hoped for returns in other ways, like getting some back-channel AGI love when it finally became conscious? :)

[TaylorAlexander]

Maybe. I’m operating a non profit engineering project. I have no expectation that the non profit will make me money, but we do plan eventually to spin off the project in to a for-profit partner that takes the open source and adds value-add fleet management systems (it’s a farming robot) and service contracts. We are modeling this after the successful implementation of this method by the Ardupilot drone software founders.

So while the non profit is a specific legal entity that has a certain clear function, one may still want to use this public benefit open source project for for-profit means.

However this doesn’t really apply to OpenAI, because their system is not open source and also because strangely, their non profit owns the for-profit. Non-profit founders could theoretically be fine desiring profit, but the way OpenAI has done it seems particularly strange.