logo
OpenAI's advisory board calls for continued and strengthened nonprofit oversight

OpenAI's advisory board calls for continued and strengthened nonprofit oversight

The Hill17-07-2025
OpenAI should continue to be controlled by a nonprofit because the artificial intelligence technology it is developing is 'too consequential' to be governed by a corporation alone.
That is the message from an advisory board convened by OpenAI to give it recommendations about its nonprofit structure — delivered in a report released Thursday, along with a sweeping vision for democratizing AI and reforming philanthropy.
'We think it's too important to entrust to any one sector, the private sector or even the government sector,' said Daniel Zingale, the convener of OpenAI's nonprofit commission and a former adviser to three California governors. 'The nonprofit model allows for what we call a common sector,' that facilitates democratic participation.
The recommendations are not binding on OpenAI, but the advisory commission, which includes the labor organizer Dolores Huerta, offers a framework that may be used to judge OpenAI in the future, whether or not they adopt it.
In the commission's view, communities that are already feeling the impacts of AI technologies should have input on how they are developed, including how data about them is used. But there are currently few avenues for people to influence tech companies who control much of the development of AI.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, started in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory and has since incorporated a for-profit company with a valuation that has grown to $300 billion. The company has tried to change its structure since the nonprofit board ousted its CEO Sam Altman in Nov. 2023. He was reinstated days later and continues to lead OpenAI.
It has run into hurdles escaping its nonprofit roots, including scrutiny from the attorney generals in California and Delaware, who have oversight of nonprofits, and a lawsuit by Elon Musk, an early donor to and founder of OpenAI.
Most recently, OpenAI has said it will turn its for-profit company into a public benefit corporation, which must balance the interests of shareholders and its mission. Its nonprofit will hold shares in that new corporation, but OpenAI has not said how much.
Zingale said Huerta told the commission their challenge was to help make sure AI is a blessing and not a curse. To grapple with those stakes, they envision a nonprofit with an expansive mandate to help everyone participate in the development and trajectory of AI.
'The measure of this nonprofit will be in what it builds, who it includes, and how faithfully it endures to mission and impact,' they wrote.
The commission toured California communities and solicited feedback online. They heard that many were inspired by OpenAI's mission to create artificial intelligence to benefit humanity and ensure those benefits are felt widely and evenly.
But, Zingale said many people feel they are in the dark about how it's happening.
'They know this is profoundly important what's happening in this 'Age of Intelligence,' but they want to understand better what it is, how it's developed, where are the important choices being made and who's making them?' he said.
Zingale said the commission chose early on not to interact with Altman in any way in order to maintain their independence, though they quote him in their report. However, they did speak with the company's senior engineers, who they said, 'entered our space with humility, seriousness, and a genuine desire to understand how their work might translate into democratic legitimacy.'
The commission proposed OpenAI immediately provide significant resources to the nonprofit for use in the public interest. For context, the nonprofit reported $23 million in assets in 2023, the most recent year that its tax filing is available.
The commission recommend focusing on closing gaps in economic opportunity, investing in AI literacy and creating an organization that is accessible to and governed by everyday people.
'For OpenAI's nonprofit to fulfill its mandate, it should commit to more than just doing good – it should commit to being known, seen, and shaped by the people it claims to serve,' they wrote.
The commission suggested opening a rapid response fund to help reduce economic strains now. Zingale said they specifically recommended funding theater, art and health.
'We're trying to make the point that they need to dedicate some of their resources to human to human activities,' he said.
The commission also recommended setting up a requirement that a human lead the nonprofit, which Zingale said is a serious recommendation and 'a sign of the times.'
___
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Microsoft CEO makes bold statement on company's future
Microsoft CEO makes bold statement on company's future

Miami Herald

timean hour ago

  • Miami Herald

Microsoft CEO makes bold statement on company's future

In a candid memo released July 24, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed what he called the issue "weighing heavily" on him: the company's ongoing layoffs. More than 15,000 Microsoft employees have been let go in 2025 alone, as part of what Nadella described as a necessary but painful restructuring in the age of AI. Don't miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet's free daily newsletter The company also cut nearly 2,000 additional staff deemed "low performers" earlier this year. "I want to speak to what's been weighing heavily on me, and what I know many of you are thinking about: the recent job eliminations," he wrote. Related: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that ChatGPT is not the way to superintelligence Recall Nadella wrote a similar note in 2023 - shortly after the company paused raises and announced its first significant layoffs of the post-pandemic era. He faced criticism at the time for placing too much focus on the company's outperformance without acknowledging those difficult moves. Despite the cuts, investors have rewarded Microsoft's leaner operating model. The company's stock closed above $500 for the first time on July 9, a symbolic milestone that arguably underscores Wall Street's growing faith in Microsoft's AI strategy. In his July memo, Nadella used stark language to describe the current environment, stating: "This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value." "Progress isn't linear," he added. "It's dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it's also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before." For the past decade, Microsoft (MSFT) has operated under a unifying purpose: to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. But Nadella says that vision now needs to evolve. Related: Analysts unveil bold Amazon stock price target before earnings "We must reimagine our mission for a new era," he wrote. "What does empowerment look like in the era of AI? It's not just about building tools for specific roles or tasks. It's about building tools that empower everyone to create their own tools." This shift reflects the company's broader transformation from a software-centric business to what Nadella calls an "intelligence engine empowering every person and organization to build whatever they need to achieve." Microsoft's strategy hinges on positioning itself at the center of the AI value chain. Its Azure cloud platform is rapidly becoming the infrastructure of choice for AI workloads. OpenAI, as well as other major AI labs and enterprises, use Microsoft's GPU-centric cloud services to train and deploy large models. Copilot, Microsoft's generative AI assistant, has also been integrated into Office, GitHub, and enterprise software suites. More Tech Stocks: Amazon tries to make AI great again (or maybe for the first time)Veteran portfolio manager raises eyebrows with latest Meta Platforms moveGoogle plans major AI shift after Meta's surprising $14 billion move By reframing Microsoft as a platform that enables AI-native innovation, Nadella aims to extend the company's dominance beyond cloud and productivity into the AI-native economy. Nadella's statement marks a strategic realignment that mirrors an entire industry in transition. As Microsoft retools its mission, the world is watching to see if it can balance innovation, values, and leadership in one of the most disruptive technological shifts in history. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.

Learn How to Use ChatGPT to Automate Your Business
Learn How to Use ChatGPT to Automate Your Business

Entrepreneur

timean hour ago

  • Entrepreneur

Learn How to Use ChatGPT to Automate Your Business

Streamline operations, boost productivity, and future-proof your skills with 25+ hours of hands-on training for just $19.97. Disclosure: Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you'll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, Entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners. Smart professionals aren't just learning to use AI — they're using it to take back their time. If your day is filled with repetitive tasks, disjointed workflows, or too many tools that don't talk to each other, this ChatGPT and Automation E-Degree could be the pivot point you need. Designed for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and business pros, this $19.97 course bundle covers more than 25 hours of hands-on training across 12 lectures. You'll go beyond the basics of ChatGPT and explore how more than 20 top AI tools can help you solve real-world challenges in business, marketing, and development. From building customized GPT workflows to automating routine processes and visualizing data in a more impactful way, the content is tailored to actual use cases, not just theory. You'll learn how to communicate better with AI tools, use automation to streamline your workload, and even discover how generative AI can help with creativity for your brand or product. Even better, this deal includes lifetime access. That means you can return to the material whenever you're ready to tackle a new project or apply what you've learned in a new context. Whether you're looking to sharpen your tech skills, improve productivity, or future-proof your career, this course helps you get there with tools and strategies you can implement right away. Grab the full ChatGPT and Automation E-Degree on sale for $19.97 and start building a smarter, faster business. StackSocial prices subject to change.

AI Is Taking Over Your Search Engine. Here's a Look Under the Hood
AI Is Taking Over Your Search Engine. Here's a Look Under the Hood

CNET

timean hour ago

  • CNET

AI Is Taking Over Your Search Engine. Here's a Look Under the Hood

For decades, the way we find information on the internet changed only in small ways. Doing a traditional Google search today doesn't feel all that different from when, in the 1990s, you would Ask Jeeves. Sure, a lot has changed under the hood, the results are likely far more relevant and the interface has some new features, but you're still typing in keywords and getting a list of websites that might hold the answer. That way of searching, it seems, is starting to go the way of AltaVista, may it rest in peace. In May, Google announced the rollout of its new AI Mode for search, which uses a generative AI model (based on the company's Gemini large language model) to give you conversational answers that feel a lot more like having a chat and less like combing through a set of links. Other companies, like Perplexity and OpenAI, have also deployed search tools based on gen AI. These tools, which merge the functionality of a chatbot and a traditional search engine, are quickly gaining steam. You can't even escape AI by doing just a regular Google search: AI Overviews have been popping up atop those results pages since last year, and about one in five searches are now showing this kind of summary, according to a Pew Research Center report. I'm surprised it's not even more than that. These newfangled search tools feel a lot like your typical chatbot, like ChatGPT, but they do things a little differently. Those differences share a lot of DNA with their search engine ancestors. Here's a look under the hood at how these new tools work, and how you can use them effectively. Everything Announced at Google I/O 2025 Everything Announced at Google I/O 2025 Click to unmute Video Player is loading. Play Video Pause Skip Backward Skip Forward Next playlist item Unmute Current Time 0:13 / Duration 15:40 Loaded : 6.33% 00:13 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 15:27 Share Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Close Modal Dialog This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button. Close Modal Dialog This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button. Everything Announced at Google I/O 2025 Search engines vs. AI search: What's the difference? The underlying technology of a search engine is kinda like an old library card catalog. The engine uses bots to crawl the vast expanses of the internet to find, analyze and index the endless number of web pages. Then, when you do a search to ask who played Dr. Angela Hicks on ER, because you're trying to remember what else you've seen her in, it will return pages for things like the cast of ER or the biography of the actor, CCH Pounder. From there, you can click through those pages, whether they're on Wikipedia or IMDB or somewhere else, and learn that you know CCH Pounder from her Emmy-winning guest appearance on an episode of The X-Files. "When customers have a certain question, they can type that question into Google and then Google runs their ranking algorithms to find what content is the best for a particular query," Eugene Levin, president of the marketing and SEO tool company Semrush, told me. Generally, with a traditional search, you have to click through to other websites to get the answer you're looking for. When I was trying to figure out where I recognized CCH Pounder from, I clicked on at least half a dozen different sites to track it down. That included using Google's video search -- which combs an index of videos across different hosting platforms -- to find clips of her appearance on The X-Files. Google announced AI Mode at its I/O developer conference in May. Google/Screenshot by Joe Maldonado/CNET These multiple searches don't necessarily have to happen. If I just want to know the cast of ER, I can type in "cast of ER" and click on the Wikipedia page at the top. You'll usually find Wikipedia or another relevant, trustworthy site at or near the top of a search result page. That's because a main way today's search algorithms work is by tracking which sites and pages get most links from elsewhere on the web. That model, which "changed the game for search" when Google launched it in the 1990s, was more reliable than indexing systems that relied on things like just how many times a keyword appeared on a page, said Sauvik Das, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "There's lots of cookie recipes on the web, but how do you know which ones to show first?" Das said. "Well, if a bunch of other websites are linking to this website for the keywords of 'cookie recipe,' that's pretty difficult to game." AI-powered search engines work a little differently, but operate on the same basic infrastructure. In my quest to see where I recognized CCH Pounder from, I asked Google's AI Mode, literally, "Where do I recognize the actress who plays Dr. Angie Hicks on ER from?" In a conversation that felt far more like chatting with a bot than doing searches, I narrowed it down. The first result gave me a list of shows and movies I hadn't seen, so I asked for a broader list, which featured her guest appearances on other shows. Then I could ask for more details about her X-Files appearance, and that narrowed it down. While the way I interacted with Google was different, the search mechanisms were basically the same. AI Mode just used its Gemini model to develop and process dozens of different web searches to gather the information needed, Robby Stein, vice president of product for Google Search, told me. "A user could've just queried each of those queries themselves." Basically, AI Mode did the same thing I did, just a lot faster. So many searches, so little time The approach here is called "query fan-out." The AI model takes your request and breaks it down into a series of questions, then conducts searches to answer those components of the request. It then takes the information it gathers from all those searches and websites and puts it together in an answer for you. In a heartbeat. Those searches are using the same index that a traditional search would. "They work on the same foundation," Levin said. "What changes is how they pull information from this foundation." This fan-out process allows the AI search to pull in relevant information from sites that might not have appeared on the first page of traditional search results, or to pull a paragraph of good information from a page that has a lot more irrelevant information. Instead of you going down a rabbit hole to find one tiny piece of the answer you want, the AI goes down a wide range of rabbit holes in a few seconds. "They will anticipate, if you're looking for this, what is the next thing you might be interested in?" Levin said. Read more: AI Essentials: 29 Ways You Can Make Gen AI Work for You, According to Our Experts The number of searches the AI model will do depends on the tool you're using and on how complicated your question is. AI Mode that uses Google's Deep Search will spend more time and conduct more searches, Stein said. "Increasingly, if you ask a really hard question, it will use our most powerful models to reply," Stein said. The large language models that power these search engines also have their existing training data to pull from or use to guide their searches. While a lot of the information is coming from the up-to-date content it finds by searching the web, some may come from that training data, which could include reams of information ranging from websites like this one to whole libraries of books. That training data is so extensive that lawsuits over whether AI companies actually had the right to use that information are quickly multiplying. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) AI search isn't just a chatbot Not relying on training data is one thing that sets an AI-powered search engine apart from a traditional chatbot, even though the underlying language model might be largely the same. While ChatGPT Search will scour the internet for relevant sites and answers, regular ChatGPT might rely on its own training data to answer your question. "The right answer might be in there," Das said. "It might also hallucinate a likely answer that isn't anywhere in the pre-training data." The AI search uses a concept called retrieval-augmented generation to incorporate what it finds on the internet into its answer. It collects information from a source you point it to (in this case, the search engine index) and tells it to look there instead of making something up if it can't find it in its training data. "You're telling the AI the answer is here, I just want you to find where," Das said. "You get the top 10 Google results, and you're telling the AI the answer is probably in here." Perplexity offers AI-powered search through its app and through a newly announced browser. Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images Can you really trust AI search results? These AI-powered search tools might be more reliable than just using a chatbot itself, because they're pulling from current, relevant information and giving you links, but you still have to think critically about it. Here are some tips from the experts: Bring your human skepticism Consider how bad people are at telling when you're sarcastic on the internet. Then think about how bad a large language model might be at it. That's how Google's AI Overviews came up with the idea to put glue on pizza -- by pulling information from a humorous Reddit post and repeating it as if it were real culinary advice. "The AI doesn't know what is authentic and what is humorous," Das said. "It's going to treat all that information the same." Remember to use your own judgement and look for the sources of the information. They might not be as accurate as the LLM thinks, and you don't want to make important life decisions based on somebody's joke on an internet forum that a robot thought was real. AI can still make stuff up Even though they're supposed to be pulling from search results, these tools can still make things up in the absence of good information. That's how AI Overviews started creating fake definitions for nonsensical sayings. The retrieval-augmented generation might reduce the risk of outright hallucinations but doesn't eliminate it, according to Das. Remember that an LLM doesn't have a sense of what the right answer to a question is. "It's just predicting what is the next English word that would come after this previous stream of other English words or other language words," Das said. "It doesn't really have a concept of truthiness in that sense." Check your sources Traditional search engines are very hands-off. They will give you a list of websites that appear relevant to your search and let you decide whether you want to trust them. Because an AI search is consolidating and rewriting that information itself, it may not be obvious when it's using an untrustworthy source. "Those systems are not going to be entirely error-free, but I think the challenge is that over time you will lose an ability to catch them," Levin said. "They will be very convincing and you will not know how to really go and verify, or you will think you don't need to go and verify." But you can check every source. But that's exactly the kind of work you were probably hoping to avoid using this new system that's designed to save you time and effort. "The problem is if you're going to do this analysis for every query you perform in ChatGPT, what is the purpose of ChatGPT?" Levin said.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store