Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity, primarily by attempting to build safe AGI and share the benefits with the world.

We’ve experienced⁠ firsthand⁠ that the most dramatic AI systems use the most computational power⁠ in addition to algorithmic innovations, and decided to scale much faster than we’d planned when starting OpenAI. We’ll need to invest billions of dollars in upcoming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.

We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance. Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit—which we are calling a “capped-profit” company.

The fundamental idea of OpenAI LP is that investors and employees can get a capped return if we succeed at our mission, which allows us to raise investment capital and attract employees with startup-like equity. But any returns beyond that amount—and if we are successful, we expect to generate orders of magnitude more value than we’d owe to people who invest in or work at OpenAI LP—are owned by the original OpenAI Nonprofit entity.

Going forward (in this post and elsewhere), “OpenAI” refers to OpenAI LP (which now employs most of our staff), and the original entity is referred to as “OpenAI Nonprofit.”