(Bloomberg) -- OpenAI, the artificial intelligence startup behind ChatGPT, is working on a plan to restructure so that its nonprofit board would no longer control its main business, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The nonprofit arm of OpenAI would continue to exist and would own a minority stake in the for-profit company, the news service reported on Wednesday, without identifying its sources. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman will be given equity in the for-profit company, which could potentially be worth $150 billion following the restructuring, the report said.
San Francisco-based OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the Reuters report.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization with the goal of building artificial intelligence that would be safe and beneficial to humanity. The company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 in order to help fund the high costs of AI model development, and has since drawn billions in outside investment from Microsoft Corp. and others.
Separately on Wednesday, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said she is leaving OpenAI, adding to a series of high-profile departures in the past year. Others exiting include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist, who left in May. In August, co-founder Greg Brockman said he would go on leave until the end of the year, and researcher John Schulman left for AI rival Anthropic. The departures leave only two members of OpenAI’s original founding team at the company: Altman and Wojciech Zaremba.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was in talks to raise $6.5 billion from investors at a valuation of $150 billion. The new valuation, a figure that doesn’t include the money being raised, is significantly higher than the $86 billion valuation from the company’s tender offer earlier this year, and cements its place as one of the most valuable startups in the world.
(Updates with outreach to OpenAI for comment in third paragraph.)
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