(VOR News) – Established under Delaware law and housed in Mountain View, California, a scientific OpenAI research organization filed an application with the Internal Revenue Service in 2016 seeking recognition as a tax-exempt charitable entity.
The nonprofit OpenAI has sent their goal statement to the IRS as “Advance digital intelligence in the manner most likely to benefit mankind as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial returns.”
Among its assets was a $10 million loan from Sam Altman, the present CEO and one of the four founding directors of the company.
The application offers a window into the early years of the artificial intelligence powerhouse, which has since grown to include a for-profit subsidiary lately valued at $157 billion by investors.
Since charities had documented it, OpenAI forwarded it to The Associated Press.
It is only one illustration of the notable advancements in less than a decade OpenAI and the technologies it creates have accomplished.
Though it has already done so, OpenAI indicated in its application that it would not engage in any collaborative ventures with for-profit companies. Moreover, it said it “did not intend to participate in the development of commercial products or equipment” and committed itself to providing the public unlimited access to its research.
OpenAI spokesman Liz Bourgeois claims that the organization’s goals and policies have stayed the same; but, the way it has carried out its mission has changed in line with technology developments.
Nonprofit legal advisory experts have closely watched OpenAI’s changing organizational structure and extraordinary expansion. Some, however, wonder whether its breadth and scale have exceeded or surpassed what NGOs and for-profits can achieve taken together.
They also ask whether certain people might benefit personally from its illegal activities and to what degree its main operations support its required charity goals.
Generally speaking, nonprofit professionals feel that OpenAI has made tremendous efforts to set its organizational structure in line with the regulations controlling charitable entities. Litigator Andrew Steinberg of Venable LLP and member of the American Bar Association’s nonprofit organizations committee believes OpenAI’s application to the IRS seems typical.
According to Steinberg, the company must reveal any changes to its plans and structure in its yearly tax returns—which it has already done.
“The current business structure and the investment structure they implemented were the ones they had in mind when the IRS reviewed the application,” he said. It’s reasonable as such an option might have developed later on.
The salient features of the application are:
First research goals
The company’s research goals at the time seemed ancient in comparison to the rivalry to create artificial intelligence, which was mainly driven by OpenAI’s publishing of ChatGPT in 2022.
OpenAI told the IRS it wanted to create AI software to solve a wide range of games. Its goals were to create an automaton able to do home tasks and a system able of “executing intricate instructions in natural language”.
These days, its capacity much exceeds those technical limitations. Among its offerings are text-to-image generators and chatbots capable of recognizing emotions and creating code.
There are no plans to get into business.
Declaring in its application, OpenAI, a nonprofit, said it did not want to form alliances with for-profit companies. “OpenAI has no intention of engaging in the development of equipment or goods for sale.”
It aims to provide free, public access to its research. According to OpenAI’s spokesman, Bourgeois, the company thinks that the best way to achieve its goals is to create tools—many of which are free—that help artificial intelligence to be applied to address problems. Still, she said, they feel that forming commercial relationships has helped their goal to be advanced.
Intellectual property
OpenAI said in a 2016 IRS report that their goal is to routinely publicly publish its research. OpenAI plans to regularly post its research results on its website and provide open source licensed software to the public.
Furthermore mentioned was the company’s “aspires to maintain ownership of any intellectual property it generates.”
If OpenAI decides to change its organizational structure, serious questions about the value of the intellectual property and whether it belongs to the nonprofit or for-profit subsidiary could surface, Altman said in September.
SOURCE: USN
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