Non-profits are allowed to own for profit entities and use the profits to fund their non-profit activities. It is a pretty common model used by many entities from Mozilla[1][2] to the National Geographic Society[3][4].
This is misleading at best. There are rules you must follow to do this legally and OAI's structure violates some of them and is under scrutiny from the IRS so their new plan is for the non-profit to completely sell off the subsidiary and then die or go into "maintenance mode" with the new fully commercial subsidiary carrying the ball (and the team) forward to riches.
I considered things like this as an original Mozilla person back in the day. Mozilla could have sold the Firefox organization or the whole corporation for billions when it had 30% of the web, but that would have been a huge violation o of trust so it was never even on the table.
That so many here are fans of screwing the world over for a buck makes this kind of comment completely unsurprising.
There's rules to follow to prevent what is called "private benefit", which OpenAI most likely broke with things like their (laughable) "100X-limited ROI" share offering.
>It is a pretty common model [...]
It's not, hence why most people are misinformed about it.
I considered things like this as an original Mozilla person back in the day. Mozilla could have sold the Firefox organization or the whole corporation for billions when it had 30% of the web, but that would have been a huge violation o of trust so it was never even on the table.
That so many here are fans of screwing the world over for a buck makes this kind of comment completely unsurprising.