New document shows OpenAI's journey from nonprofit to $157 billion company World News

It's a measure of the enormous distance OpenAI and the technology it researches and develops has covered in less than a decade.

In the application, OpenAI indicated that it did not plan to enter into any joint ventures with for-profit companies, which it did. He also stated that he planned to play no role in the development of commercial products or equipment and committed to making his research available to the public free of charge.

An OpenAI spokeswoman, Liz Bourgeois, said in an email that the organization's mission and goals remain constant, although the way it conducts its mission has evolved as technology advances.

Lawyers specializing in advising nonprofits are closely following OpenAI's meteoric rise and changing structure. Some question whether the scale of its size and current ambitions have exceeded or exceeded the limits of how nonprofits and for-profits can interact.

They also wonder to what extent their primary activities further their charitable mission, which they certainly do, and whether some might personally benefit from their work, which is prohibited.

In general, nonprofit experts agree that OpenAI has gone to great lengths to organize its corporate structure to comply with the rules governing nonprofits. OpenAI's application to the IRS seems typical, said Andrew Steinberg, an attorney at Venable LLP and a member of the American Bar Association's nonprofit committee.

If the organization's plans and structure change, it must report that information in its annual tax return, Steinberg said, which it has already done.

At the time the IRS reviewed the request, there was no information that they had in mind the corporate structure that exists today and the investment structure they followed, he said. And that's okay because this can evolve later.

Here are some highlights of the app:

Primary research objectives

At first glance, OpenAI's research plans seem strange in light of the race for AI development that begins with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

OpenAI told the IRS it plans to train an AI agent to solve a variety of games. The goal was to build a robot that could do household chores and develop technology that could follow complex instructions in natural language.

Today, its products, which include text-to-image generators and chatbots that can detect emotions and write code, have pushed these technological boundaries.

No commercial ambitions

Non-profit organization OpenAI indicated in its application that it has no plans to enter into joint ventures with for-profit organizations

It also states that OpenAI does not plan to have any role in the development of commercial products or tools. It intends to make its research available to the public free of charge, on a non-discriminatory basis.

OpenAI spokesperson Bourgeois said the company believes the best way to fulfill its mission is to develop products that help people use AI to solve problems, including many of the products it offers for free. But they believe that developing business partnerships has helped them achieve their goals, he said.

Intellectual property

OpenAI informed the IRS in 2016 that regularly sharing its research with the general public is critical to OpenAI's mission. OpenAI will regularly publish the results of its research on its website and share the software it develops with the world under an open source software license.

It also wrote that it intends to retain ownership of any intellectual property it develops.

The value of that intellectual property and whether it is owned by nonprofits or nonprofit subsidiaries could become important questions if OpenAI decides to change its corporate structure, as Altman confirmed in September that it was considering.