TechCrunch, February 2023
Elon Musk tweeted Saturday a ChatGPT conversation that speculated about the 2019 transition of its creator, OpenAI, from a nonprofit to a for-profit organization. The AI chatbot concluded that, if the for-profit business had used the nonprofit’s resources for the change, it would have been “highly unethical and illegal.”
It appears that Musk and ChatGPT didn’t have all the facts. Tax filings seen by TechCrunch indicate the original OpenAI nonprofit retained control over all of its financial assets, totaling tens of millions of dollars, meaning none of its money was used to spin out the organization’s commercial enterprises.
The interesting part is where that money ended up: financing Universal Basic Income pilots aiming to fix the very problems OpenAI’s technologies seem to be creating.
