[gucci-on-fleek]

> Of course there's a huge risk of it becoming made for-profit.

The article says that "it will become an independent nonprofit corporation", and as OpenAI's failed attempt showed, converting a non-profit to a for-profit organization is either really hard or impossible.

> Could they not have made it into some legal structure that puts universities at the top?

As a corporation (even a non-profit one), it will have a board of directors. I have no idea what their charter will look like, but I would be surprised if at least one seat wasn't reserved for a university representative, and more than that seems quite likely as well.

[MostlyStable]

OpenAI didn't get everything that they wanted, but I very much disagree with calling it a "failed attempt". The non-profit went from owning the entirety of OpenAI to having ~25% stake.

[ronsor]

Sam Altman is a special kind of person; not many could pull off the schemes he does.

[gentleman11]

I doubt it was him who architected it. A team of lawful evil lawyers more likely

[gucci-on-fleek]

Ah, thanks for the correction.

[cbolton]

The non-profit still controls the board doesn't it?

[weedhopper]

As shown by Altman, not really.

[mort96]

Is your argument really that "OpenAI was an independent nonprofit corporation and it worked out great, Arxiv will remain just as non-profit as OpenAI"?

[gucci-on-fleek]

No, my argument is that OpenAI could make billions of dollars if they converted from a non-profit to a for-profit, and they only succeeded after years of effort and because they had already structured the company into separate for-profit and non-profit entities. And even after all this, the non-profit still controls the majority of the for-profit entity.

So if OpenAI with billions of dollars only partially succeeded at converting to a for-profit business, then that suggests that organizations with fewer resources (like arXiv) have much worse odds.