YouSaid · the spoken record

Evan Greer

lines on the record: 43
first: 2025-09-04
most recent: 2025-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Are watching this because they know that AI is going to have huge ramifications on society and where open AI goes, the industry could follow. We should make sure that the benefit to the public truly comes out forward on this. And it would be a shame if we lost a benefit to the community on this.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was responsive to the public. It could fund advocacy. It could fund public option for compute. It could fund research that would happen at universities and not in private labs that are only owned by shareholders. It could fund workforce training. It could fund education. It could fund all of these things that currently the state is just not in a position to fund. And that would benefit everybody, the public, to take advantage of this new technology. And hopefully that would ensure that AI was being used as a benefit and being used by us and not on us. And that would affect all of the companies who are operating this space, not just apply to open AI in a vacuum.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a conversation we're having about one company and its governance structure, but it is ramifications for the entire AI industry. And open AI kind of set itself up as A nonprofit that was going to set an industry-wide standard for this technology before there was an industry. When they released ChatGPT, they became just another player in that industry. And I don't blame them for this. Like they have to compete with Anthropic and Google and Meta and all the other model builders. And that means that they're nonprofit is hamstrung. It can't really do the work of advancing its mission because it is so tied to the fate of this one player in the industry. What would be possible if the AG did what we're asking him to do and there was a spin out organization or set of organizations that had control of a significant amount of assets to ensure that AGI was benefiting all of humanity is they could do work that would cross the industry. It wouldn't just be about open AI. It would be about making sure that the entire industry”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifics to the public. This is a deal behind closed doors. I think it would just be a huge setback for nonprofit integrity in the state. And so we truly believe that the AG will do the right thing, be transparent, show us what the investigation yields, and protect nonprofit integrity in California.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are waiting for the Attorney General. We're continuing to meet with the Attorney General to see where they're going up to now. They say very little. But we do have to see more specifics around the governance piece that we've raised, right? How are they going to remove all the conflicts of interest? Are they going to put together strong whistleblower laws to ensure that the company truly is mission driven and not for-profit driven? And then on the other end, we want to ensure that there's an independent entity that is free from the conflict, free to pursue the mission that is fairly valued and can be set up similar to the previous foundations that Catherine mentioned, the California Endowment Wellness. But the biggest signal that we're waiting for now is from the AG. They have to complete their investigation and they have to put together, they have to show these.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what do you guys want to see happen next? We've talked about governance, the board control sounds like a key piece. They still haven't committed to the size of the equity that they're going to leave behind for the nonprofit. Obviously, that matters.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do agree, and for Open AI, it was their decision to be a nonprofit. It was part of Sam Baltman's vision. And I do think that it has created problems for them. That's they're making their nonprofit. It's up to us to ensure they act as nonprofit. But I do think that they have a unique structure that they want to just go on and race ahead and beat the competition. It's different for them because of the things that they've said and the things that they've committed to.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just so people understand what you're saying about Microsoft, Microsoft is obviously open eyes, larger shareholder, what's essentially happening with this nonprofit conversion is the dividing of the pie. back into more training, more compute, hiring more researchers. They're not profitable and they actually don't plan to be profitable anytime soon. So any kind of major financial hiccup on the way where all of a sudden they have to pay a ton of money or leave a bunch of equity behind could actually make them stumble in a way that I don't think people fully appreciate just considering open eyes seem so ascendant and so untouchable and and it is huge but financially it's not profitable and so all of this really matters because it's not like they can just afford to pay off the state of California billions of dollars do you all agree with that”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The health of Californians. And so it's perfectly possible. There is legal precedent for them to spin off and go about their for-profit business. And that's the path they were on. The question is, why did they decide to forego that path and try to now, as they are saying, maintain this nonprofit ownership structure, which as we've discussed isn't viable in the long term. You cannot reconcile the nonprofit and the shareholders imperative. That's the question they haven't answered. They also apparently have not worked out a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft did not know about this before they made the announcement that, in fact, they were going to maintain their nonprofit status. It is very fishy that they were on a path to doing what was very clearly the legal thing to do. And then all of a sudden, they decided not to do that and have created what I think is a bigger mess for themselves in trying to like.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be clear, their commission, the nonprofit commission that made the recommendation around independent governance, happened after that report came out after they made this decision. So in terms of the sequence of events, and I would say it's not accurate to say that they can't transition. They can absolutely transition to a for-profit. And there is precedent. The proposal that we're making to the AG is actually built on the precedent of the healthcare companies in the 90s that transitioned from nonprofits to for-profits. And when they made that transition, they negotiated with the AG to leave a certain amount of their assets behind. They have now gone on to be very successful for-profit healthcare companies, and they endowed a couple of foundations in California, the California Wellness Foundation, the California Endowment, and I think the California Healthcare Foundation that now maintain the mission and distribute those benefits to”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last couple months, which we've been talking about, is that Basically, they realized they couldn't do that, that there was too much opposition, I think, from your coalition. They created their own commission to look into this and their own commission said that the nonprofit needed to stay in control, OpenAI. So that's why they, I think, decided to keep the nonprofit in play is they realized there was going to be no legal path forward to fully getting rid of it. But yeah, I also have the questions you have, Catherine. I don't really understand how they can have it both ways. How can you have a nonprofit board still in quote-unquote control when it really is just sitting over to the side with a bunch of shares that it got from this conversion?”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to take another quick break, we'll be right back. And we're back Because this is just very complex. I want to explain to the listener how this for profit subsidiary works. So we should explain why they created this in the first place, which is that they needed a way to raise money and they couldn't do it feasibly through the nonprofit. They needed to raise billions of dollars for compute. But they have caps. It's like 100x roughly cap to align with the nonprofit mission that an investor can make in its investment. And the website for open AI used to say like all investors should treat this as a donation. We're not even legally obligated like a normal for-profit company to ensure or work in our best interest to make a return on your investment. But they did that. And so there's this cap. They want to remove the cap so that more investors can come in, put billions more in, and then eventually they can IPO with a potentially unlimited upside as well. And to do that, they've been trying to get rid of the nonprofit. And what happened in the”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“met with OpenAI's team shortly after the decision where they retreated for profit. Not only would they not answer questions, but they said they didn't have the answers to a lot of the questions. So to Catherine's point, it seems like something happened and they retreated quickly without truly knowing how this was going to play out.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were told that, yeah, we would make sure that the nonprofit didn't have control. And so they tried to spin out into its own entity. I think the major question is why they decided to stop going that route and to maintain their current structure with the nonprofit ownership and what assurances they've given to those investors that make them okay with maintaining the nonprofit ownership of the for-profit company. It doesn't make any sense that they would be if the nonprofit is still in a position to put the priority of the mission above the profit priority. So do they have some agreement between the shareholders and the company that the nonprofit only has control on paper and will not ever challenge the for-profit? These are questions that have not been answered. And I think that their decision not to actually spin out.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One set of people we haven't talked about yet very much are the investors. And I just cannot reconcile this current proposed structure that they want to live under. Maintaining the nonprofit ownership of the for-profit but converting the for-profit into a basically no different from a normal startup where shareholders can have equity stakes, Sam Altman presumably can have equity stakes, the employees can have equity stakes, that they can eventually go public. And that soft bank and thrive are going to be okay with the nonprofit board being able to drive the company to zero. I'm sure there was a conversation at some point before the $48 billion funding round where they said, we're not going to do this unless you can guarantee that the nonprofit does not have the control to do that. And I suspect.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Haven't waited much on the specifics of the mission. I think what's important is the governance and the practice align with their current mission. I think the current mission is fine. What's not fine is the conflicts of interest that we see you asked earlier, what is the board doing now? I think that's the biggest question. We're not sure who's really in charge here, right? Is it Microsoft? Is it the investors? Is it the employees? It appears employees were given shares, right? Current and former employees were given shares of this company. And so of course they don't want to see their nonprofit go down because their sharers would go down. But that's, again, big reason why there's a huge conflict here is because when you're giving shares to your employees, we know that they're not going to be in service to the mission. They're going to be in service to wanting to get paid, right? It's the tech mentality, the startup.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We should just be clear that the nonprofit mission is to develop AGI that benefits all of humanity. I have a lot of problems with that because it's inherently very squishy and can be defined however you want what is benefiting mean in that context, what is all of humanity. But yeah, maybe we can talk about that. Like, does the mission need to change for the nonprofit? Is it too vague? Because at the time in 2023, when Sam was fired, that board decided that firing Sam was in the benefit of AGI for all of humanity. But, you know, it's hard to get there perhaps now. It's hard to see exactly how you execute that day to day, I guess.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maximizing the profitability of this company for shareholders, for employees, for whoever is always aligned with the mission of the nonprofit. And when the mission diverges from the profit motivation, the mission has to always override. Even if that means taking the company to zero. And if they can't live with that, that's totally fine. They should spin off the for-profit and leave a significant set of assets in the charitable sector. That's all we're asking them to do. It's not really clear why they refuse to do so.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only commitment, it's only fiduciary responsibility, is to the mission of the organization. My sense from OpenAI is that they don't understand their responsibility to the mission. They do treat this like a for-profit company, and they have sort of diluted themselves into thinking that by building the most powerful, valuable for-profit entity, that is ultimately in service to the nonprofit because it will deliver more financial benefits to the nonprofit that it could then do something with to further the mission. And that's actually not the point at all. I mean, as a nonprofit leader myself, my responsibility is to turn down money if it is going to affect my ability to execute against the mission. And it is the board's legal responsibility to provide oversight to ensure that I do that as the CEO. So there is no world in which”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say they are still legally a nonprofit. I would say they're actually a nonprofit on paper. But we don't think that they are operating legally, which is sort of the point you were making. And in order for operating legally as a nonprofit, yes, the”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the mission that we have as the board. And everyone that worked at OpenAI, the quote unquote, for-profit company, was just like aghast at this because it is a crazy thing because like OpenAI at that time was already a super commercial entity. It was resetting the tech industry fundamentally in the AI race. And so to hear that, wait, like we're controlled by this board that the interest of the board could mean that the company shuts down. It's a very strange concept. And I'm wanting to double click on that with you guys. What exactly is the governance role of the board as it exists today? And what does that mean? It means they can just shut the company down.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And that board, that same board, it's not the same, it's almost completely changed over, but legally, that same board still controls the company to this day because OpenAI, despite the headlines, and a lot of people probably think OpenAI has not been a nonprofit for the last while, it still is legally a nonprofit because it hasn't done this transition. So it's the same governance structure as what it had fundamentally when Sam was fired in 2023. There's a scene from that saga that board coop that I remember vividly where a bunch of open AI execs got in a room at headquarters and they got on the phone with a group of board members who fired Sam. And I'm paraphrasing, but at one point, one of the execs said something like, what you're doing is killing the company. You know, OpenAI will go to zero if you follow through with this and you don't bring Sam back. And one of the board members on the other end of the call said that would be perfectly in line.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody here thinks that that independent entity should receive the full $500 billion. I think right now the AG of Delaware and the AG of California are trying to value what the assets might be. But our goal is that they're continuing to be strong governance so that OpenAI adheres to safeguards some of the things we really need in the AI sector, but then that we have an independent entity that is fairly valued and perhaps over time funded, right? It could remain connected to the OpenAI so that there are a lot of talks of open AI going public one day. This independent nonprofit could get shares of that. So we are asking for two things, the ongoing governance and independent entity that will oversee the distribution of assets.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I clarify one of the things that we are pushing for is essentially open AI has two functions as a nonprofit. One is to adhere to its mission and that Safeguards to ensure that AI is used for the benefit of humanity. So there's a governance piece there that we think still should continue. And there's a second piece, which is the distribution of assets, which they mention also in their mission statement. We're arguing that they continue to govern with that mission in mind because they have to. They've decided that they want to stay a nonprofit, but that the distribution of assets be free of conflict and that those assets be spun off to an independent entity.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And practically, this looks like the assets are shares of OpenAI. It's just straight money. I'm being kind of silly here, but it's not like the people of California will all of a sudden get governance over chat GPT usage in California, right? We're talking about financial assets.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Legally, that is what the law says. I think the AG has some latitude on. What kind of settlement he could negotiate with them? I think he does have to balance the interests of maintaining California's position as a place where innovation can happen and also the public interest. It is true that these assets were created with the support of the people of California and the law says that if you make this transition, you have to leave behind assets. And so those assets, some significant number of those assets should remain in the public interest so that they can be used to advance the mission of AI benefiting all of humanity.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the same time, I think you both can appreciate that for them to theoretically leave charitable assets behind, I mean, that's essentially the whole company. I mean, what else is there? Developer platform company, the charity as it exists is really nothing. I mean, the charity entity. I'm not sure what it does. The last time I saw the IRS report on it, it had negligible assets. It was like maybe tens of millions, whereas the rest of OpenAI is worth hundreds of billions. So for them to, like you were saying, Catherine, properly leave behind the charitable assets, they have to basically start over from scratch. Is that what you guys are asking them to do?”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can add, I highly doubt that the AG would let them go on just because they might feel as though the train has left the station just because of the issues that Catherine raised, the precedence, right, the appearance of public interest governments to attract goodwill and resources and then just abandoning those. If they get the green light, I can't imagine how many other nonprofits would try to do the same thing. So because of that, I do think that the AG would sue them and we would, of course, urge the AG, who serves the people of California to sue because of the precedent that this sets.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Behind in the charitable sector, then that would be fine. I would totally support them leaving. But by trying to take the money with them, they are making a mockery of the rule of law, which I think is one of the impacts it would have on California and the entrepreneurial environment. And mocking its competitors creating a permission structure by which any startup could try and do the same thing. If they are allowed to do this with no consequence, no real consequence, then it will provide the blueprint for other companies to do the same thing and the AG won't really have as much, you know, moral authority to stop that from happening.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason the law exists in the way that it exists is to prevent companies from doing exactly this. I mean, it is legal. If they want to transition to a for-profit, they can, but they cannot take the assets that they built as a nonprofit with them as they do so. So I suspect that they had a conversation with the Attorney General about this transition and were told, I mean, I don't know, but they were told that they would have to leave a certain amount of those assets behind if they decided to make this transition. And they have since decided that, in fact, no, they're not, they're going to maintain that their current status as sort of a potemkin nonprofit that oversees the for-profit and at the same time remove the profit caps on investors and let investors do whatever they want and take the company public. And that's the kind of thing that I think is not acceptable. They were just transitioning to a for-profit and leaving the assets.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do the same thing for them to start as a nonprofit with tax exempt status and then switch later on when they decide they want to start making money. What do you guys think the second order effects are if open AI gets its way here ultimately and gets to pull this off? Maybe they pay a fine back taxes or they have to give more of their assets to the charity than they want. But essentially they get through all this because the train has left the station What are the effects on other companies? You both run nonprofits. What are the effects on other nonprofits?”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit of a charade to say that they are operating as a nonprofit in the same way that, like, a traditional charity, this idea that they should receive the same benefits that a soup kitchen receives is kind of ludicrous at this point. And, you know, if I was competitor to open AI and I was having to follow a set of governance laws that apply to for-profit companies and OpenAI didn't, then I don't know, that would make me kind of upset. So I just think it's time to throw off that charade and stop allowing them to use this nonprofit banner. In their interest, they want all the benefits of a nonprofit status without any of the responsibility. And I think that's wrong.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If they override that mission and by private motives and they shift toward maximizing revenue instead of maximizing public good, then you're in violation of your nonprofit charter, right? We both run nonprofits. We can't get rich of our nonprofits. We are highly regulated as nonprofits. We have to put together reports, audits that are available to the public. The same thing applies for OpenAI. And we just feel that they are operating with enormous amount of secrecy and that they're putting together the profit motives ahead of mission.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's difficult because if you look at their structure today, they're interconnected with a variety of LLCs, strong connection to Microsoft. What we do know is that the nonprofit status implies a strong legal and an ethical obligation to put the public interest ahead of shareholder returns. That's what we want. If that mission gets diluted,”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is wild to me. So, are you saying that, and I think just people need to understand this if this is true, that open AI, the hottest. Company in the world that's about to be the most valuable private company in the world at 500 billion potentially in the coming months is tax exempt.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From that mission. And I think at a certain point became for all intents and purposes a for profit startup that was competing with other for-profit companies that were building similar technology. And they were able to do so under a nonprofit banner with all of those tax benefits in place.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Neither one of us is a lawyer, so should make that caveat here. But both of us are founders of nonprofits and have boards and lawyers ourselves that tell us what we can and can't do. So, I mean, I think we can speak to it from that perspective. Obviously, any nonprofit can take donations tax-free to the donor. And nonprofits also don't have to pay taxes. And then they operate under, you know, a set of rules that in exchange for that tax exempt status, they must, you know, do things that are in service of a public mission and not to benefit a private profit motive. There's a variety of different ways that can look conflicts of interest and private inert and other things. But essentially, OpenAI, starting as a research lab, created this mission. And I think as part of this mission, which made sense at the time, they were going to build this technology that could be in service to humanity over the course of time crept away.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“economic organizations, social justice organizations, educational organizations, also some labor organizations. And so today it's a coalition of over 60 organizations that continues to press the Attorney General in California can oversee charitable mission and charitable law to ensure that OpenAI truly acts as a nonprofit and that they truly stick to their mission statement.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coalition came about, we were all reading the same articles. We're opening it. I wanted to basically abandon its nonprofit roots and go fully private. Many of us were concerned, one open AI clearly is developing technology that will have severe consequences for society, will impact a lot of things. But we were looking at it mostly from a charitable asset law. where we need that there's precedence saying that if you do convert to for-profit and abandon your nonprofit roots, then you have to leave behind your public assets, your charitable assets, which at the time that we came together were valued roughly around $100 billion today. It's about could be $500 billion. So the coalition came together, various nonprofit organizations.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To protect the technology and protect the mission is worrying. And so Orson and I and a coalition of other organizations are trying to make sure that at least the mission itself is protected, if not the governance structure.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And interviewed Sam Altman for the book and wanted to understand his thinking behind setting open AI up as a nonprofit. I didn't know that he would be so explicit about doing so because he wanted to protect it from investors, but that's exactly what he told me, that he knew and he knew very well because he was running Y Combinator at the time. He knew what investors would ask of this technology. He knew that those asks would create risks. for AGI to not achieve the mission of benefiting all of humanity, but instead be focused on profit in the focus on profits, create a lot of risks for humanity in the process. So the nonprofit structure was explicitly meant to protect society. And I think the fact that since I've had that conversation with Sam, they've taken a turn away from that mission and that strong.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it might be helpful for your listeners to just be reminded of open AI's history and why it was founded, which is important to understand the governance structure. It was founded in order to ensure that this technology that its founders believed was imminent was going to benefit humanity and not undermine it. They had a strong understanding of the potential risks of AGI and they wanted to build something that could harness that technology for good. And that was a lofty mission. And I think a lot of us at the time were very supportive of it. They structured themselves as a nonprofit explicitly to protect that technology and that mission from the imposition of investors onto the technology. And I thought this was very telling. I just wrote a book about venture capital.”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Catherine and Orson, I'm so excited to have you both on because I think this is an important topic that more people should actually understand and they may in the coming months as this all comes to a head. That said, no one from Open AI is here in this conversation. So I also kind of want to play devil's advocate here a little bit. And so my first question for both of you is simply Why should we care about open AI's nonprofit status? Why does it matter?”
2025-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quest to keep OpenAI honest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT