OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman revealed that the decision to abandon non-profit status in 2017 stemmed from the realization that achieving AGI would necessitate acquiring vast compute resources, including hardware from companies like Cerebras and large data centers. The founders concluded that non-profit fundraising had a financial cap insufficient for the scale of investment required to pursue their mission.
The AGI race is fundamentally a capital-intensive compute acquisition challenge, forcing even mission-driven entities to adopt for-profit structures to secure necessary funding.