It is hard to attract multi-billion dollar investments and attract elite AI talent when competing with for-profits. This was the stated reason and makes a lot of sense. The comp packages for elite AI talent is now claimed to be in the range of $10M.

To maintain a clear separation between for-profit and non-profit activities. If a non-profit operates in a market with for-profit competitors, tax authorities may start considering it a for-profit organization, making all of its income taxable.

And maybe to allow choosing the right people for the right job. If the non-profit has an ideological purpose, its leadership should probably reflect that. At the same time, the for-profit subsidiary probably works better under professional management.

If a nonprofit has mostly revenue and few donations (Mozilla) the IRS revokes their tax exemption. OpenAI could not have done the Microsoft deal as a nonprofit.

> What’s the point of the subsidiary

Closing the huge fundraising gap OpenAI had as a nonprofit by returning profits from commercial efforts instrumental to, but distinct from, the nonprofits charitable purpose, without sacrififing any governance or control of the subordinate entity.

Lol, 10 billion dollars of cookies and t-shirts. They'll have to be bigger than Nestle and Zara. To sell AI services, they need to build it and for that they need the money.

It's literally the exact corporate structure of Mozilla.

Preverse it is: "IKEA’s 15 years of tax evasion and fraud via the Netherlands" - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2021-00517...

It is but that's capitalism, the alternative is to have what happens with most corporations where their majority shareholder is blackrock/vanguard etc, a basically souless investment conglomerate, whose majority shareholder is the other of blackrock/vanguard, etc. and then the 3rd biggest and then the fourth so on and so on.

You basically never have a person in the chain actually making decisions for anything but to maximize profit.