By Björn Jeffery, SvD Tech Brief. Published in Svenska Dagbladet on 6 May 2025.
OpenAI is forced to abandon its plan to convert to a commercial company. But more interesting is one sentence where the company’s view on the future of AI appears to have taken an entirely new direction.
Elon Musk, modest as ever, explains his relationship to the company behind ChatGPT in an interview on CNBC: “I am the reason OpenAI exists.”
Musk was one of the founders and a major early financier. After that, accounts diverge as to what actually happened at what has become the world’s most important AI company — and more specifically: how OpenAI should be owned and run.
The company has been attempting to convert from nonprofit governance to something resembling a more conventional commercial operation. That process has now been abandoned by OpenAI after running into several legal obstacles. Instead it will now become what is known as a “public benefit corporation” — a kind of hybrid between nonprofit and commercial. Musk sued OpenAI in August 2024 over the restructuring — a lawsuit that continues and is scheduled to reach court next March.
This may sound like a trivial question of corporate governance. But one single sentence in OpenAI’s blog post hints at something considerably larger.
“Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure — which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI player, but not in a world with many good AGI companies — we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone holds equity.”
“A world with many good AGI companies”? That small phrase implies something of a minor revolution.
AGI — artificial general intelligence — is the definition of when AI technology is as capable as, or more capable than, a human being. The debate about whether this would ever happen — and if so, when — has been going on for a long time.
What OpenAI is now writing makes it sound more like a question of how many companies will manage to develop AGI simultaneously — rather than whether anyone will do so at all. Given that the company has spent so much time reshaping its corporate structure in recent months, it could also suggest that AGI is closer in time than many had assumed. Does OpenAI know something the rest of the world does not?
What they describe would mean that several AI systems simultaneously surpass human capabilities, with competition emerging between them. Utopia gives way to ordinary capitalism. OpenAI accordingly concludes that it is not viable to own such technology within a nonprofit structure. Competition in AGI may demand enormous investment.
The situation raises further questions. Some researchers and advocacy groups have previously warned of the risks posed by uncontrollable AI systems. In 2023, the major AI companies were urged to pause their development to avoid arriving at such a scenario. The result has been almost precisely the opposite: an enormous acceleration on multiple fronts, in many parts of the world simultaneously.
At the same time, companies making safety their defining concern have also emerged — including the new company from OpenAI’s former co-founder and research chief, Ilya Sutskever. The company is called “Safe Superintelligence Inc,” which may be considered about as explicit as a name can get.
If AGI lies in our near future and will be developed by several different companies, one must consider how these operations should best be financed and owned. The argument from Elon Musk lies also in the name — OpenAI was designed to be a nonprofit that would be open and accessible to many. That is how important and groundbreaking the technology was already considered when the operation started in 2015.
Ten years later, we may now find ourselves in a situation where several of the world’s largest companies privately own what could be the technological breakthrough of the century — AGI. Technology’s equivalent of penicillin.
That there is money to be made in this space is obvious. Considerably less obvious is what happens when these enormous financial rewards push development faster and faster between competing companies. What happens when the technology outpaces those who are developing it? Nobody can answer that question with any certainty today.
