Noticias

OpenAI: How should we think about the AI company’s nonprofit structure?

Published

1 mes ago

24 abril, 2025

Sergio Villanueva

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape of not just AI companies but huge companies in general.

OpenAI’s board of directors is bound not to the mission of providing value for shareholders, like most companies, but to the mission of ensuring that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” as the company’s website says. (Still private, OpenAI is currently valued at more than $300 billion after completing a record $40 billion funding round earlier this year.)

That situation is a bit unusual, to put it mildly, and one that is increasingly buckling under the weight of its own contradictions.

For a long time, investors were happy enough to pour money into OpenAI despite a structure that didn’t put their interests first, but in 2023, the board of the nonprofit that controls the company — yep, that’s how confusing it is — fired Sam Altman for lying to them.

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It was a move that definitely didn’t maximize shareholder value, was at best very clumsily handled, and made it clear that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit could potentially have huge implications — especially for its partner Microsoft, which has poured billions into OpenAI.

Altman’s firing didn’t stick — he returned a week later after an outcry, with much of the board resigning. But ever since the firing, OpenAI has been considering a restructuring into, well, more of a normal company.

Under this plan, the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI would sell its control of the company and the assets that it owns. OpenAI would then become a for-profit company — specifically a public benefit corporation, like its rivals Anthropic and X.ai — and the nonprofit would walk away with a hotly disputed but definitely large sum of money in the tens of billions, presumably to spend on improving the world with AI.

There’s just one problem, argues a new open letter by legal scholars, several Nobel-prize winners, and a number of former OpenAI employees: The whole thing is illegal (and a terrible idea).

Their argument is simple: The thing the nonprofit board currently controls — governance of the world’s leading AI lab — makes no sense for the nonprofit to sell at any price. The nonprofit is supposed to act in pursuit of a highly specific mission: making AI go well for all of humanity. But having the power to make rules for OpenAI is worth more than even a mind-bogglingly large sum of money for that mission.

“Nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed is so important to OpenAI’s mission that removing control would violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries,” the letter argues. Those beneficiaries are all of us, and the argument is that a big foundation has nothing on “a role guiding OpenAI.”

And it’s not just saying that the move is a bad thing. It’s saying that the board would be illegally breaching their duties if they went forward with it and the attorneys general of California and Delaware — to whom the letter is addressed because OpenAI is incorporated in Delaware and operates in California — should step in to stop it.

I’ve previously covered the wrangling over OpenAI’s potential change of structure. I wrote about the challenge of pricing the assets owned by the nonprofit, and we reported on Elon Musk’s claim that his own donations early in OpenAI’s history were misappropriated to make the for-profit.

This is a different argument. It’s not a claim that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit ought to produce a higher sale price. It’s an argument that OpenAI, and what it may create, is literally priceless.

OpenAI’s mission “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence is safe and benefits all of humanity,” Tyler Whitmer, a nonprofit lawyer and one of the letter’s authors, told me. “Talking about the value of that in dollars and cents doesn’t make sense.”

Are they right on the merits? Will it matter? That’s substantially up to two people: California Attorney General Robert Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings. But it’s a serious argument that deserves a serious hearing. Here’s my attempt to digest it.

When OpenAI was founded in 2015, its mission sounded absurd: to work towards the safe development of artificial general intelligence — which, it clarifies now, means artificial intelligence that can do nearly all economically valuable work — and ensure that it benefited all of humanity.

Many people thought such a future was a hundred years away or more. But many of the few people who wanted to start planning for it were at OpenAI.

They founded it as a nonprofit, saying that was the only way to ensure that all of humanity maintained a claim to humanity’s future. “We don’t ever want to be making decisions to benefit shareholders,” Altman promised in 2017. “The only people we want to be accountable to is humanity as a whole.”

Worries about existential risk, too, loomed large. If it was going to be possible to build extremely intelligent AIs, it was going to be possible — even if it were accidental — to build ones that had no interest in cooperating with human goals and laws. “Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” Altman said in 2015.

Thus the nonprofit. The idea was that OpenAI would be shielded from the relentless incentive to make more money for shareholders — the kind of incentive that could drive it to underplay AI safety — and that it would have a governance structure that left it positioned to do the right thing. That would be true even if that meant shutting down the company, merging with a competitor, or taking a major (dangerous) product off the market.

“A for-profit company’s obligation is to make money for shareholders,” Michael Dorff, a professor of business law at the University of California Los Angeles, told me. “For a nonprofit, those same fiduciary duties run to a different purpose, whatever their charitable purpose is. And in this case, the charitable purpose of the nonprofit is twofold: One is to develop artificial intelligence safely, and two is to make sure that artificial intelligence is developed for the benefit of all humanity.”

“OpenAI’s founders believed the public would be harmed if AGI was developed by a commercial entity with proprietary profit motives,” the letter argues. In fact, the letter documents that OpenAI was founded precisely because many people were worried that AI would otherwise be developed within Google, which was and is a massive commercial entity with a profit motive.

Even in 2019, when OpenAI created a “capped for-profit” structure that would let them raise money from investors and pay the investors back up to a 100x return, they emphasized that the nonprofit was still in control. The mission was still not to build AGI and get rich but to ensure its development benefited all of humanity.

“We’ve designed OpenAI LP to put our overall mission — ensuring the creation and adoption of safe and beneficial AGI — ahead of generating returns for investors. … Regardless of how the world evolves, we are committed — legally and personally — to our mission,” the company declared in an announcement adopting the new structure.

OpenAI made further commitments: To avoid an AI “arms race” where two companies cut corners on safety to beat each other to the finish line, they built into their governing documents a “merge and assist” clause where they’d instead join the other lab and work together to make the AI safe. And thanks to the cap, if OpenAI did become unfathomably wealthy, all of the wealth above the 100x cap for investors would be distributed to humanity. The nonprofit board — meant to be composed of a majority of members who had no financial stake in the company — would have ultimate control.

In many ways the company was deliberately restraining its future self, trying to ensure that as the siren call of enormous profits grew louder and louder, OpenAI was tied to the mast of its original mission. And when the original board made the decision to fire Altman, they were acting to carry out that mission as they saw it.

Now, argues the new open letter, OpenAI wants to be unleashed. But the company’s own arguments over the last 10 years are pretty convincing: The mission that they set forth is not one that a fully commercial company is likely to pursue. Therefore, the attorneys general should tell them no and instead work to ensure the board is resourced to do what 2019-era OpenAI intended the board to be resourced to do.

What about a public benefit corporation?

OpenAI, of course, doesn’t intend to become a fully commercial company. The proposal I’ve seen floated is to become a public benefit corporation.

“Public benefit corporations are what we call hybrid entities,” Dorff told me. “In a traditional for-profit, the board’s primary duty is to make money for shareholders. In a public benefit corporation, their job is to balance making money with public duties: They have to take into account the impact of the company’s activities on everyone who is affected by them.”

The problem is that the obligations of public benefit corporations are, for all practical purposes, unenforceable. In theory, if a public benefit corporation isn’t benefitting the public, you — a member of the public — are being wronged. But you have no right to challenge it in court.

“Only shareholders can launch those suits,” Dorff told me. Take a public benefit corporation with a mission to help end homelessness. “If a homeless advocacy organization says they’re not benefitting the homeless, they have no grounds to sue.”

Only OpenAI’s shareholders could try to hold it accountable if it weren’t benefitting humanity. And “it’s very hard for shareholders to win a duty-of-care suit unless the directors acted in bad faith or were engaging in some kind of conflict of interest,” Dorff said. “Courts understandably are very deferential to the board in terms of how they choose to run the business.”

That means, in theory, a public benefit corporation is still a way to balance profit and the good of humanity. In practice, it’s one with the thumb hard on the scales of profit, which is probably a significant part of why OpenAI didn’t choose to restructure to a public benefit corporation back in 2019.

“Now they’re saying we didn’t foresee that,” Sunny Gandhi of Encode Justice, one of the letter’s signatories, told me. “And that is a deliberate lie to avoid the truth of — they originally were founded in this way because they were worried about this happening.”

But, I challenged Gandhi, OpenAI’s major competitors Anthropic and X.ai are both public benefit corporations. Shouldn’t that make a difference?

“That’s kind of asking why a conservation nonprofit can’t convert to being a logging company just because there are other logging companies out there,” he told me. In this view, yes, Anthropic and X both have inadequate governance that can’t and won’t hold them accountable for ensuring humanity benefits from their AI work. That might be a reason to shun them, protest them or demand reforms from them, but why is it a reason to let OpenAI abandon its mission?

I wish this corporate governance puzzle had never come to me, said Frodo

Reading through the letter — and speaking to its authors and other nonprofit law and corporate law experts — I couldn’t help but feel badly for OpenAI’s board. (I have reached out to OpenAI board members for comment several times over the last few months as I’ve reported on the nonprofit transition. They have not returned any of those requests for comment.)

The very impressive suite of people responsible for OpenAI’s governance have all the usual challenges of being on the board of a fast-growing tech company with enormous potential and very serious risks, and then they have a whole bunch of puzzles unique to OpenAI’s situation. Their fiduciary duty, as Altman has testified before Congress, is to the mission of ensuring AGI is developed safely and to the benefit of all humanity.

But most of them were selected after Altman’s brief firing with, I would argue, another implicit assignment: Don’t screw it up. Don’t fire Sam Altman. Don’t terrify investors. Don’t get in the way of some of the most exciting research happening anywhere on Earth.

What, I asked Dorff, are the people on the board supposed to do, if they have a fiduciary duty to humanity that is very hard to live up to? Do they have the nerve to vote against Altman? He was less impressed than me with the difficulty of this plight. “That’s still their duty,” he said. “And sometimes duty is hard.”

That’s where the letter lands, too. OpenAI’s nonprofit has no right to cede its control over OpenAI. Its obligation is to humanity. Humanity deserves a say in how AGI goes. Therefore, it shouldn’t sell that control at any price.

It shouldn’t sell that control even if it makes fundraising much more convenient. It shouldn’t sell that control even though its current structure is kludgy, awkward, and not meant for handling a challenge of this scale. Because it’s much, much better suited to the challenge than becoming yet another public benefit corporation would be. OpenAI has come further than anyone imagined toward the epic destiny it envisioned for itself in 2015.

But if we want the development of AGI to benefit humanity, the nonprofit will have to stick to its guns, even in the face of overwhelming incentive not to. Or the state attorneys general will have to step in.

Noticias

Helen Toner, ex directora de Openai: “Si todo el desarrollo de IA se detuvo ahora, su impacto ya es tan grande como Internet” | Tecnología

Published

31 minutos ago

2 junio, 2025

Sergio Villanueva

A los 33 años, Helen Toner ha tenido una relación larga y agitada con la inteligencia artificial (IA). Su momento decisivo fue su entrada a la Junta de Directores de OpenAI en 2021, pero más aún de la forma en que se fue, poco después de votar para despedir a Sam Altman como CEO en noviembre de 2023. Tóner se niega a discutir esa experiencia en la compañía que creó ChatGPT, pero previamente ha compartido su opinión: Altman no fue honesto con la junta. “Nos enteramos de ChatGPT en Twitter”, dijo Toner. También agregó que el ejecutivo había creado una “atmósfera tóxica” en la compañía, según algunos ejecutivos.

Esa batalla terminó con la reincorporación de Altman. Toner ahora sigue de cerca el desarrollo de la IA en la industria de la defensa y en China, dos de sus especialidades, del Centro de Seguridad y Tecnología Emergente de la Universidad de Georgetown (CSET) en Washington. Ella ya ha testificado ante el Congreso sobre su visión para el futuro de la IA, que explica en esta entrevista en video.

Pregunta. ¿Por qué muchos usuarios atribuyen propiedades mágicas a la IA?

Respuesta. Yo diría que hay dos razones. Una razón obvia es la forma en que hemos aprendido sobre la IA es a través de la ciencia ficción, y la IA de ciencia ficción suele ser infalible. Tal vez sea bueno, tal vez sea malo, pero siempre tiene las respuestas correctas y puede hacer todo. Su papel en la ficción es similar al de las hadas, dioses o seres sobrenaturales. Una respuesta diferente podría ser que tenemos que cambiar la forma en que pensamos en interactuar con las computadoras, porque en la interacción a la que estamos acostumbrados con las computadoras, son muy confiables. Una calculadora siempre le da la respuesta correcta, nunca tropieza en la tercera línea de una división larga. Pero [AI] son sistemas no deterministas, dan diferentes respuestas, son solo una coincidencia de patrones y no llevan a cabo este algoritmo perfectamente especificado para resolver sus problemas, es bastante nuevo y bastante diferente.

. ¿A qué distancia llegará la IA?

A. La gente habla como si hubiera una línea de meta, que es AGI, inteligencia general artificial. Si intentas profundizar en lo que es eso, mucha gente imagina que es cuando la IA es como un humano, tan bueno como un humano. Pero sabemos que la IA nunca tendrá el mismo perfil de habilidad que un humano. Ya hay cosas en las que la IA es mucho mejor que nosotros, y otras en las que es peor. Incluso si logramos una IA tan buena como un humano, seguirá siendo diferente. No creo que alguna vez tengamos robots que sean tan buenos como los humanos en el baile social, como la salsa o el baile de swing donde estás improvisando en vivo con otro humano. No tiene sentido construir algo así. Pero tendremos sistemas de IA muy poderosos, capaces de superar a los humanos en tareas estratégicas o intelectuales. Hablamos como si hubiera un destino obvio, pero en realidad no sabemos cómo será el futuro para que los sistemas de IA se vuelvan más avanzados.

. ¿Cuál es su principal preocupación con la IA?

A. Creo que hay muchas áreas de preocupación. Los malos escenarios que me parecen más probables son en la categoría en la que elegimos dar más y más autonomía a los sistemas de IA y elegimos incrustarlos cada vez más en la sociedad y en la economía y los militares. Ese sería el primer paso. El paso dos podría ser muchos escenarios diferentes. Podría ser que AIS comience a cooperar entre sí y eventualmente tome el control de los humanos. Podría ser que vivamos en un mundo que parece agradable, pero no tiene sentido: desplazar a Tiktok todo el día y tener una buena comida chatarra para comer pero sin vidas muy significativas. O que un pequeño número de personas comienzan a colaborar con el AIS, tomamos el control, y terminamos en un mundo totalitario, con un tipo de poder muy concentrado.

. ¿Realmente crees que eso puede suceder?

A. Creo que podría ir muy, muy mal. Creo que hay una gama mucho más amplia de cosas que podrían salir muy, muy mal que “todos mueren”. Tal vez todos mueran, pero ese parece un escenario muy específico para centrarse.

. Ya estamos viendo estudios donde la IA es capaz de manipulación. ¿Estás preocupado?

A. Depende de lo que estén tratando de convencerte. Un tipo de persuasión que me parece más realista son los cultos o religiones basadas en la IA, donde la gente cree que la IA es su amiga y los está cuidando, y es un ser sabio que deben seguir y escuchar. La historia de los cultos humanos nos dice que es bastante fácil encontrar uno y hacer que la gente haga algunas cosas bastante locas. Hasta ahora, generalmente han involucrado a un pequeño número de personas. Estoy seguro de que vamos a ver cultos basados en la IA.

. No parece un asunto trivial crear una IA capaz de liderar un culto.

A. Va a ser interesante. Como mínimo, habrá muchas personas que tengan relaciones con sus compañeros de IA.

. ¿Qué tan avanzado está China en la IA?

A. Depende de qué parte de la IA esté viendo. En sistemas más avanzados, Estados Unidos todavía está por delante. Trabajo en seguridad nacional, y creo que es más difícil decirlo allí. Cómo se aplica la IA dentro del ejército importará más. Esperaría que los Estados Unidos estén mejor que China, pero no es fácil saberlo, y es un tipo diferente de problema que construir modelos más avanzados. Cuando hablamos de modelos fronterizos, eso también es difícil de medir. No sé si diría que China está un año o dos atrás. Los datos más recientes que tenemos es el lanzamiento de Deepseek V3. Deepseek lanzó dos modelos, y mucha gente estaba entusiasmada con R1, el modelo de razonamiento. Pero entre las personas que trabajan en IA, mucha gente piensa que el otro, V3, es más impresionante. Lanzaron esa en diciembre, y probablemente fueron de seis a nueve meses detrás del modelo equivalente en los EE. UU., Y el modelo de razonamiento fue de unos tres o cuatro meses de retraso. Pero desde entonces, las empresas estadounidenses han seguido progresando, y China aún no ha respondido. Actualmente tienen entre seis y doce meses atrás, pero esa brecha podría ampliarse con la implementación de controles de exportación de chips.

. ¿Qué tan temerosos debemos ser de IA militar?

A. AI es muchas cosas diferentes. Es muy natural y muy razonable que los militares usen AI. Todos los militares tienen un gran componente administrativo, con recursos humanos y finanzas, por lo que tiene mucho sentido para ellos usarlo como negocios. Tiene sentido usar la IA para procesar cuando tiene muchas más imágenes de las que sus analistas humanos pueden ver. También han tratado de usarlo para lo que llaman “mantenimiento predictivo”: por ejemplo, si tiene un montón de helicópteros y está tratando de averiguar cuándo debe hacer mantenimiento en ellos. Puede predecir mejor cuándo se va a agotarse un motor o cuándo debe reemplazarse una parte diferente.

. Y armas autónomas?

A. Los debates sobre la IA y los militares se centran demasiado en ese tema. Y es solo una pequeña parte de cómo la IA podría usarse en el ejército. Centrarse solo en armas autónomas no es el mejor enfoque. Tiendo a pensar que lo más importante para nosotros para centrarnos es en nuestras leyes existentes de conflictos armados, sobre el derecho internacional humanitario. ¿Estás distinguiendo entre combatientes y civiles? ¿Estás respondiendo proporcionalmente a los ataques? Cuando imaginamos escenarios en los que la IA y la guerra salen muy mal, a menudo es porque, por ejemplo, los civiles están siendo atacados en lugar de combatientes. Y eso ya es ilegal según el derecho internacional.

. ¿El modelo de negocio AI siempre estará basado en la suscripción?

A. Creo que el gran dinero vendrá de empresas, no de los consumidores. Debido a que es una tecnología multipropósito, no solo un chatbot divertido que las personas llevan en sus bolsillos, será una herramienta muy poderosa para todo tipo de productividad económica e innovación. Así que imagino que los ingresos en el lado comercial serán muy grandes.

. Si AI no avanza más, ¿ya tiene la capacidad de cambiar la economía?

A. Sí. Las tecnologías de uso general, como la IA, tardan décadas en integrarse en la economía. Si todo el desarrollo de la IA se detuviera ahora, no sé si sería una transformación tan grande como la gente pronostica, pero creo que ciertamente tan grande como Internet. La transición de no tener Internet a tener décadas. Incluso si nos detuviéramos ahora, todavía habría una gran cantidad de trabajo por hacer para integrar la IA en la atención médica, la educación, los procesos comerciales, la ley y las finanzas.

. ¿Y ya hemos llegado al techo de lo que AI puede hacer?

A. No apostaría por eso. La historia de los últimos 15 años en la IA no ha sido una de las grandes innovaciones que cambian por completo la forma en que se construye la IA, sino mejoras pequeñas o medianas que pueden apilarse una encima de la otra para seguir obteniendo cada vez más mejoras. En este momento, tenemos estos grandes modelos de idiomas, chatbots, a los que nos hemos acostumbrado. Pero las empresas están presionando en dos direcciones principales. Uno, modelos de razonamiento: enseñarles a pensar paso a paso para que puedan resolver problemas más duros. Y dos, agentes: enseñarles no solo a chatear con usted en una pequeña ventana del navegador, sino para salir y hacer cosas por usted y tomar medidas y ser productivos. Veremos grandes mejoras allí en los próximos 25 años.

. Es imposible predecir en qué dirección.

A. AI cambiará la forma en que funciona toda la economía política de la sociedad. Estamos en un momento inusual en este momento. Hay muchos países democráticos donde las personas tienen el control de una manera significativa. Pero eso parece estar comenzando a deslizarse en algunos países importantes. La IA reconfigurará el equilibrio de poder, por ejemplo, en el mercado laboral. ¿Cuánto poder tienen los trabajadores si atacan? ¿Cuántos soldados se necesitan en un ejército si tienes ciertos tipos de IA? El poder laboral presumiblemente disminuirá con la IA. Si podemos terminar en un mundo donde las personas tienen sus necesidades básicas y tienen acceso a la IA, eso podría ser un mundo maravilloso. Pero me preocupa que la condición básica de la humanidad para la mayor parte de la historia sea “podría hacer lo correcto” y quien tenga el poder puede hacer lo que quieren, y las personas que no tienen poder llevan vidas mucho peores.

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Noticias

¿Qué podemos esperar de la asociación Jony ive-Openai?

Published

6 horas ago

2 junio, 2025

Sergio Villanueva

A pesar de todas las exageraciones que rodean al ex director de diseño de Apple, Jony Ive, uniéndose a OpenAI, su posición presenta un nivel de influencia personal que probablemente dará forma al desarrollo de productos y los servicios asociados de la empresa.

La dirección que estos productos tomarán tentadoramente más allá de la especulación, sin embargo, cuando miramos la trayectoria profesional de Ive y, en general, el poder de colocar a un diseñador en el corazón de un negocio, es fácil ver por qué las noticias equivalen a algo.

Opadai

¿Qué ha pasado?

La consultora de diseño enigmática de Jony Ive, LoveFrom, ha estado trabajando con el CEO de Operai, Sam Altman, desde 2023. En 2024, luego fundó IO con los ex diseñadores e ingenieros de Apple Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey y Tang Ten. IO trabajó en estrecha colaboración con Operai en torno a un resumen para ayudarlo a desarrollar una nueva familia de productos. Se establecieron equipos combinados de ingenieros de hardware y software junto con tecnólogos, físicos, otros científicos e investigadores, así como expertos en desarrollo y fabricación de productos.

IO ahora ha sido adquirido anteriormente por OpenAI a una suma de $ 6.4 mil millones y, después de esto, Ive y Love de la que asumirán lo que se ha redactado extrañamente como “diseño profundo y responsabilidades creativas en OpenAi e IO”.

¿Quieres profundizar? Preguntar el tambor

Escenificado pero significativo

Todo esto se comunicó en una declaración muy extraña, que funcionó con una foto muy extraña y un video muy extraño y bastante coreografiado, que parecía celebrar la burbuja de San Francisco, que a los ojos de Altman tiene “un lugar mítico en la historia estadounidense y tal vez incluso la historia mundial”. En los términos más grandiosos, también afirmó que lo que está por venir es “la mejor tecnología que el mundo habrá visto” y “la mayor revolución tecnológica de nuestra vida”.

Sin embargo, es mejor no ser atraído por esta hipérbole y, en su lugar, tomar perspectivas externas, como cuando lo hacemos, vemos que los ingredientes para productos de consumo transformadores, y tal vez incluso productos B2B, todavía están potencialmente allí.

La parte más interesante del anuncio es que ya se ha realizado mucho trabajo. Ive se refiere a las computadoras y teléfonos como “productos heredados” en relación con la forma en que facilitan los productos OpenAI (piense en los gestos físicos que son familiares para los navegadores, la escritura, los teclados y las pantallas). Se deduce que “se creará una familia de dispositivos”, según Altman, quien promete que estos “reinventarán lo que significa usar una computadora”. He diseñado estos productos.

Hay una conversación muy separada que debe tener en torno a la ética, aunque es revelador que Ive dice en el video promocional: “La responsabilidad que Sam Bears está realmente más allá de la comprensión”. Sin embargo, Ive también dice: “Nuestras motivaciones y valores son completamente iguales”.

Darbyshire en segundo lugar de la derecha, con la extrema derecha

Trabajando con Jony ive

“John es una mezcla inusual de pensador visionario y maestro artesano”, dice el cofundador de Tangerine, Martin Darbyshire, quien es una de las personas que trajeron al negocio en 1990. “Incluso podría usar la palabra pedante en términos del nivel de detalle que diseñará algo con algo y, al mismo tiempo, puede pensar en un largo camino por delante, de muchas maneras, pero también es un alma gentil y muy humilde, así que es un alma de los detalles, así que es un alma de complejo, así que puede ser un carácter muy complejo”.

Trabajando estrechamente junto a él desde 1990 hasta 1992, Darbyshire pudo ver que Ive era “un talento de diseño fenomenal. No hay duda sobre eso. Podría hacer las cosas años antes de lo que esperaría que alguien que se hubiera graduado podría hacer”.

Hacia finales de 1992, se había unido a Apple, una compañía que también era uno de los clientes de Tangerine. Ive y Darbyshire trabajaron juntos en un proyecto conceptual para Apple llamado Juggernaut.

Darbyshire dice: “Estábamos mirando el futuro de las computadoras portátiles. Apple tenía el Newton Pad, que usaba un bolígrafo y una especie de reconocimiento muy temprano de la escritura a mano, por lo que además de tener un teclado pequeño en una pantalla y un bolígrafo, también era la introducción de una tableta, si lo desea, pero era un dispositivo grueso que sostenía en su mano. No era pequeño”.

Tangerine desarrolló tres conceptos para mejorar esto (ver imagen de banner). “Estaba el espacio de trabajo, que era una especie de computadora de escritorio pero portátil, boceto, que se doblaba en una bolsa de embrague, y luego Folio, que era un conjunto de elementos separados que comprendían una pantalla con un soporte y luego un teclado inalámbrico y un bolígrafo”, dice Darbyshire, quien agrega: “Fue el comienzo de lo que el iPad podría ser, pero temprano pensando en ese respeto”. “.

Este fue el final del tiempo breve pero formativo de Ive en Tangerine. “A través del éxito de ese proyecto, John, fue tentado a ir a Apple. Quería reclutarlo y dijimos: ‘Ve, es una gran oportunidad'”.

Sin atar demasiado a la carrera de Apple de Ive, vale la pena recordar que estaba muy involucrado personalmente en los resultados de diseño del iPod, iPhone y iPad.

¿Cuánta diferencia puede hacer un diseñador?

Si bien el talento de Ive no debería ser ignorado, tampoco deberíamos ser arrastrados al elogiar su genio cuando gran parte de su éxito en Apple se redujo a su estructura: a saber, colocar el diseño en el corazón del negocio donde fue respaldado por el CEO de la compañía.

Ya sea que le acredite a sí mismo o a la forma en que Apple se estableció con el éxito de la definición de categorías y los productos revolucionarios, se ha demostrado los paralelos obvios con la fe, por lo que no es tan difícil pensar en el impacto que podría tener este conjunto de productos Operai.

Darbyshire todavía es cauteloso con su evaluación del poder de Ive. “John es un diseñador fenomenalmente talentoso, pero solo ha podido hacer lo que hizo en Apple porque fue empoderado fundamentalmente por un CEO [Steve Jobs] quien creía en el diseño. Sin ese respaldo, el diseño siempre tendrá dificultades para entregar lo que puede “.

La alternativa sería una “empresa que el mercado investiga todo hasta la muerte, tiene un punto de vista de consenso sobre las cosas y busca lo que creen que complacerá a todos porque creen que ese es el camino más seguro”, dice.

La pregunta de $ 7tn

También existe el asunto de las cantidades inconcebibles de dinero que se colocan en Operai, que no es rentable en este momento y tampoco se espera que sea hasta 2029, según Bloomberg.

Mientras tanto, Altman tiene como objetivo recaudar $ 7TN, como informa The Guardian como parte de una entrevista con la periodista tecnológica Karen Hao, quien le dijo al periódico: “Cuando él [Altman] está hablando con alguien, lo que sale de su boca no está necesariamente correlacionado tanto con sus propias creencias como con lo que él piensa que la otra persona necesita escuchar “. Esto más bien explica su habilidad para la recaudación de fondos.

Las sumas de dinero que se recaudan son, según Hao, “una amenaza para la democracia” y advierte que este es el verdadero peligro de IA, en lugar de otras visiones de apocalipsis. Ella le dijo a The Guardian que Operai “recaudó $ 40 mil millones en la última ronda” y tener el control de esa cantidad de dinero “es una amenaza”.

Sin señalar específicamente en OpenAi, Darbyshire plantea otro punto en torno a la rentabilidad. “El éxito de una empresa se debe a la forma en que opera, su cultura y también el modelo de negocio que desarrolla para garantizar que gane dinero, porque hay muchas empresas orientadas a dispositivos que no han llegado a ninguna parte y se quedaron sin dinero porque no tenían un flujo de ingresos sostenible”.

Después de una grabación en una reunión de OpenAI que se pasa al Wall Street Journal, se entiende que el producto es “consciente del entorno y la vida de un usuario, será discreto, capaz de descansar en el bolsillo o en el escritorio”, pero estará bastante separado del teléfono o la computadora portátil de un usuario.

Los productos excepcionales aún necesitan servicios e infraestructura

“Lo que siempre es difícil con los productos es cómo los monetiza”, dice Darbyshire, quien agrega: “Depende de si están tratando de ser un negocio impulsado por las ganancias y, a menos que tengan un modelo de suscripción robusto de algún tipo, los dispositivos son difíciles de ganar dinero”.

“Si observa Fitbit, no ha obtenido ganancias desde 2015, a pesar de ser propiedad de Google, y hay muchas más fallas que los éxitos en este frente, por lo que esto es lo que me intriga”.

Si bien es probable que OpenAi deposite un producto de consumo de uso masivo, Darbyshire dice que sería interesante si OpenAi “mirara la atención médica o el mercado B2B, pero eso sería un gran cambio de los productos de estilo de vida que John está asociado hasta cierto punto”.

Dependiendo de dónde se vea, puede ver que, en promedio, Operai generalmente está valorado en alrededor de $ 300 mil millones, pero sus ingresos de 2025 fueron de $ 12.5 mil millones. “La forma en que estas compañías son valoradas realmente me desconcertan”, dice Darbyshire.

Sin embargo, parece haber valor de marca en OpenAI. Kantar ha colocado el chat GPT de Openai en 60 en la encuesta de marcas globales más valiosas de su mundo, Brandz 2025. La percepción de la marca es significativa, diferente, destacada, conveniente, decidida y disruptiva lo ha hecho allí, según Kantar

Entonces, sin especular demasiado, podemos ver que Jony Ive tiene un historial comprobado para diseñar productos que ofrecen nuevas formas de interactuar con la tecnología, sin embargo, esto solo se ha habilitado cuando sus equipos pudieron diseñar radicalmente y fueron compatibles como una función comercial central. La historia también nos dice que sin un mecanismo de diseño de servicio para el soporte (como un servicio de suscripción popular), los productos por sí solos no conducirán al éxito comercial. Pero el público claramente está muy interesado en ChatGPT y su empresa matriz un poco misteriosa.

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Noticias

Sam Altman biographer Keach Hagey explains why the OpenAI CEO was ‘born for this moment’

Published

11 horas ago

2 junio, 2025

Sergio Villanueva

In “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future,” Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey examines our AI-obsessed moment through one of its key figures — Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.

Hagey begins with Altman’s Midwest upbringing, then takes readers through his career at startup Loopt, accelerator Y Combinator, and now at OpenAI. She also sheds new light on the dramatic few days when Altman was fired, then quickly reinstated, as OpenAI’s CEO.

Looking back at what OpenAI employees now call “the Blip,” Hagey said the failed attempt to oust Altman revealed that OpenAI’s complex structure — with a for-profit company controlled by a nonprofit board — is “not stable.” And with OpenAI largely backing down from plans to let the for-profit side take control, Hagey predicted that this “fundamentally unstable arrangement” will “continue to give investors pause.”

Does that mean OpenAI could struggle to raise the funds it needs to keep going? Hagey replied that it could “absolutely” be an issue.

“My research into Sam suggests that he might well be up to that challenge,” she said. “But success is not guaranteed.”

In addition, Hagey’s biography (also available as an audiobook on Spotify) examines Altman’s politics, which she described as “pretty traditionally progressive” — making it a bit surprising that he’s struck massive data center deals with the backing of the Trump administration.

“But this is one area where, in some ways, I feel like Sam Altman has been born for this moment, because he is a deal maker and Trump is a deal maker,” Hagey said. “Trump respects nothing so much as a big deal with a big price tag on it, and that is what Sam Altman is really great at.”

In an interview with TechCrunch, Hagey also discussed Altman’s response to the book, his trustworthiness, and the AI “hype universe.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You open the book by acknowledging some of the reservations that Sam Altman had about the project — this idea that we tend to focus too much on individuals rather than organizations or broad movements, and also that it’s way too early to assess the impact of OpenAI. Did you share those concerns?

Well, I don’t really share them, because this was a biography. This project was to look at a person, not an organization. And I also think that Sam Altman has set himself up in a way where it does matter what kind of moral choices he has made and what his moral formation has been, because the broad project of AI is really a moral project. That is the basis of OpenAI’s existence. So I think these are fair questions to ask about a person, not just an organization.

As far as whether it’s too soon, I mean, sure, it’s definitely [early to] assess the entire impact of AI. But it’s been an extraordinary story for OpenAI — just so far, it’s already changed the stock market, it has changed the entire narrative of business. I’m a business journalist. We do nothing but talk about AI, all day long, every day. So in that way, I don’t think it’s too early.

And despite those reservations, Altman did cooperate with you. Can you say more about what your relationship with him was like during the process of researching the book?

Well, he was definitely not happy when he was informed about the book’s existence. And there was a long period of negotiation, frankly. In the beginning, I figured I was going to write this book without his help — what we call, in the business, a write-around profile. I’ve done plenty of those over my career, and I figured this would just be one more.

Over time, as I made more and more calls, he opened up a little bit. And [eventually,] he was generous to sit down with me several times for long interviews and share his thoughts with me.

Has he responded to the finished book at all?

No. He did tweet about the project, about his decision to participate with it, but he was very clear that he was never going to read it. It’s the same way that I don’t like to watch my TV appearances or podcasts that I’m on.

In the book, he’s described as this emblematic Silicon Valley figure. What do you think are the key characteristics that make him representative of the Valley and the tech industry?

In the beginning, I think it was that he was young. The Valley really glorifies youth, and he was 19 years old when he started his first startup. You see him going into these meetings with people twice his age, doing deals with telecom operators for his first startup, and no one could get over that this kid was so smart.

The other is that he is a once-in-a-generation fundraising talent, and that’s really about being a storyteller. I don’t think it’s an accident that you have essentially a salesman and a fundraiser at the top of the most important AI company today.

That ties into one of the questions that runs through the book — this question about Altman’s trustworthiness. Can you say more about the concerns people seem to have about that? To what extent is he a trustworthy figure?

Well, he’s a salesman, so he’s really excellent at getting in a room and convincing people that he can see the future and that he has something in common with them. He gets people to share his vision, which is a rare talent.

There are people who’ve watched that happen a bunch of times, who think, “Okay, what he says does not always map to reality,” and have, over time, lost trust in him. This happened both at his first startup and very famously at OpenAI, as well as at Y Combinator. So it is a pattern, but I think it’s a typical critique of people who have the salesman skill set.

So it’s not necessarily that he’s particularly untrustworthy, but it’s part-and-parcel of being a salesman leading these important companies.

I mean, there also are management issues that are detailed in the book, where he is not great at dealing with conflict, so he’ll basically tell people what they want to hear. That causes a lot of sturm-und-drang in the management ranks, and it’s a pattern. Something like that happened at Loopt, where the executives asked the board to replace him as CEO. And you saw it happen at OpenAI as well.

You’ve touched on Altman’s firing, which was also covered in a book excerpt that was published in the Wall Street Journal. One of the striking things to me, looking back at it, was just how complicated everything was — all the different factions within the company, all the people who seemed pro-Altman one day and then anti-Altman the next. When you pull back from the details, what do you think is the bigger significance of that incident?

The very big picture is that the nonprofit governance structure is not stable. You can’t really take investment from the likes of Microsoft and a bunch of other investors and then give them absolutely no say whatsoever in the governance of the company.

That’s what they have tried to do, but I think what we saw in that firing is how power actually works in the world. When you have stakeholders, even if there’s a piece of paper that says they have no rights, they still have power. And when it became clear that everyone in the company was going to go to Microsoft if they didn’t reinstate Sam Altman, they reinstated Sam Altman.

In the book, you take the story up to maybe the end of 2024. There have been all these developments since then, which you’ve continued to report on, including this announcement that actually, they’re not fully converting to a for-profit. How do you think that’s going to affect OpenAI going forward?

It’s going to make it harder for them to raise money, because they basically had to do an about-face. I know that the new structure going forward of the public benefit corporation is not exactly the same as the current structure of the for-profit — it is a little bit more investor friendly, it does clarify some of those things.

But overall, what you have is a nonprofit board that controls a for-profit company, and that fundamentally unstable arrangement is what led to the so-called Blip. And I think you would continue to give investors pause, going forward, if they are going to have so little control over their investment.

Obviously, OpenAI is still such a capital intensive business. If they have challenges raising more money, is that an existential question for the company?

It absolutely could be. My research into Sam suggests that he might well be up to that challenge. But success is not guaranteed.

Like you said, there’s a dual perspective in the book that’s partly about who Sam is, and partly about what that says about where AI is going from here. How did that research into his particular story shape the way you now look at these broader debates about AI and society?

I went down a rabbit hole in the beginning of the book, [looking] into Sam’s father, Jerry Altman, in part because I thought it was striking how he’d been written out of basically every other thing that had ever been written about Sam Altman. What I found in this research was a very idealistic man who was, from youth, very interested in these public-private partnerships and the power of the government to set policy. He ended up having an impact on the way that affordable housing is still financed to this day.

And when I traced Sam’s development, I saw that he has long believed that the government should really be the one that is funding and guiding AI research. In the early days of OpenAI, they went and tried to get the government to invest, as he’s publicly said, and it didn’t work out. But he looks back to these great mid-20th century labs like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, which are private, but there was a ton of government money running through and supporting that ecosystem. And he says, “That’s the right way to do it.”

Now I am watching daily as it seems like the United States is summoning the forces of state capitalism to get behind Sam Altman’s project to build these data centers, both in the United States and now there was just one last week announced in Abu Dhabi. This is a vision he has had for a very, very long time.

My sense of the vision, as he presented it earlier, was one where, on the one hand, the government is funding these things and building this infrastructure, and on the other hand, the government is also regulating and guiding AI development for safety purposes. And it now seems like the path being pursued is one where they’re backing away from the safety side and doubling down on the government investment side.

Absolutely. Isn’t it fascinating?

You talk about Sam as a political figure, as someone who’s had political ambitions at different times, but also somebody who has what are in many ways traditionally liberal political views while being friends with folks like — at least early on — Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. And he’s done a very good job of navigating the Trump administration. What do you think his politics are right now?

I’m not sure his actual politics have changed, they are pretty traditionally progressive politics. Not completely — he’s been critical about things like cancel culture, but in general, he thinks the government is there to take tax revenue and solve problems.

His success in the Trump administration has been fascinating because he has been able to find their one area of overlap, which is the desire to build a lot of data centers, and just double down on that and not talk about any other stuff. But this is one area where, in some ways, I feel like Sam Altman has been born for this moment, because he is a deal maker and Trump is a deal maker. Trump respects nothing so much as a big deal with a big price tag on it, and that is what Sam Altman is really great at.

You open and close the book not just with Sam’s father, but with his family as a whole. What else is worth highlighting in terms of how his upbringing and family shapes who he is now?

Well, you see both the idealism from his father and also the incredible ambition from his mother, who was a doctor, and had four kids and worked as a dermatologist. I think both of these things work together to shape him. They also had a more troubled marriage than I realized going into the book. So I do think that there’s some anxiety there that Sam himself is very upfront about, that he was a pretty anxious person for much of his life, until he did some meditation and had some experiences.

And there’s his current family — he just had a baby and got married not too long ago. As a young gay man, growing up in the Midwest, he had to overcome some challenges, and I think those challenges both forged him in high school as a brave person who could stand up and take on a room as a public speaker, but also shaped his optimistic view of the world. Because, on that issue, I paint the scene of his wedding: That’s an unimaginable thing from the early ‘90s, or from the ‘80s when he was born. He’s watched society develop and progress in very tangible ways, and I do think that that has helped solidify his faith in progress.

Something that I’ve found writing about AI is that the different visions being presented by people in the field can be so diametrically opposed. You have these wildly utopian visions, but also these warnings that AI could end the world. It gets so hyperbolic that it feels like people are not living in the same reality. Was that a challenge for you in writing the book?

Well, I see those two visions — which feel very far apart — actually being part of the same vision, which is that AI is super important, and it’s going to completely transform everything. No one ever talks about the true opposite of that, which is, “Maybe this is going to be a cool enterprise tool, another way to waste time on the internet, and not quite change everything as much as everyone thinks.” So I see the doomers and the boomers feeding off each other and being part of the same sort of hype universe.

As a journalist and as a biographer, you don’t necessarily come down on one side or the other — but actually, can you say where you come down on that?

Well, I will say that I find myself using it a lot more recently, because it’s gotten a lot better. In the early stages, when I was researching the book, I was definitely a lot more skeptical of its transformative economic power. I’m less skeptical now, because I just use it a lot more.