OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made some public comments at a conference in Italy on Thursday indicating that the company intends to restructure and let go of its nonprofit structure, but he said the departures of several key executives a day earlier were unrelated.

We still don't know, exactly, what prompted the nonprofit board of OpenAI to fire Sam Altman last November, only to resinstate him within a few days. But rifts in the C-suite at the company appear to have formed around how to move OpenAI forward without doing harm to humanity at large.

And since that upheaval last fall, the company has lost a lot of its key leadership, including several cofounders. Cofounder Ilya Sutskever resigned in May along with researcher Jan Leike. In August, cofounder John Schulman left to join rival Anthropic, where Leike also went, and it was revealed that cofounder Greg Brockman was on leave at least through the end of the year.

And on Wednesday, CTO Mira Murati anounced her departure from OpenAI, along with Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and research leader Barret Zoph.

The timing seems more than coincidental with Altman announcing a move toward a more profit-focused OpenAI that answers to shareholders, but Altman is insisting it's just a coincidence.

At the event in Turin today, Italian Tech Week, he said the three latest departures were "just about people being ready for new chapters of their lives and a new generation of leadership," per the Associated Press.

Altman said that the company's board was considering a transition into a public benefit corporation — a company that is meant to help society, but which has a profit motive as well.

"OpenAI will be stronger for it as we are for all of our transitions,” Altman said, per the AP. "I saw some stuff that this was, like, related to a restructure. That’s totally not true. Most of the stuff I saw was also just totally wrong."

He added, contradictorally, "But we have been thinking about [a restructuring]," and he said that the changes would be so that the company could best "get to our next stage."

Still, in a company statement, the company said the nonprofit arm of the enterprise would remain.

"We remain focused on building AI that benefits everyone and as we’ve previously shared we’re working with our board to ensure that we’re best positioned to succeed in our mission,” the statement say. "The nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist."

Cofounder Elon Musk, who has not been involved in the company for several years, filed to sue OpenAI and its board in March, claiming that the company had strayed from its nonprofit mission. Altman responded by publishing a number of emails between OpenAI executives and Musk from earlier years in which he agreed that a for-profit aspect was necessary in order to raise the capital needed to pay for the computing power that generative AI requires.

With his resignation in May, Leike previously said that OpenAI was letting safety "take a backseat to shiny products." And another former researcher at the company, Daniel Kokotajlo, joined some other whistleblowers in speaking to the New York Times in June.

"When I signed up for OpenAI, I did not sign up for this attitude of ‘Let’s put things out into the world and see what happens and fix them afterward,’” said former researcher William Saunders, speaking to the Times. Saunders left the company in February.

And Kokotajlo told the paper, "OpenAI is really excited about building A.G.I. [artificial general intelligence], and they are recklessly racing to be the first there."

The unusual governance structure established at the company in 2015, with the idea that AI needs guardrails like a nonprofit board, appears to be an impediment that Altman and perhaps some other execs want out from under. But it's not yet clear what this will mean, or if the board will cotinue to have significant influence.

Any restructuring, also, will have to be approved by the board as it stands. As of May, Altman was put back on the board. Sutskever and Murati both resigned their board seats previously.

"My six-and-a-half years with the OpenAI team have been an extraordinary privilege," Murati said in a note posted to X Wednesday. "There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right."

Reuters was reporting Thursday afternoon that the changes in the corporate structure at OpenAI were essentially a done deal, the nonprofit board would no longer be in control, and that Altman would receive equity in the for-profit enterprise for the first time.

Previously: President Biden to Host Global AI Safety Summit In San Francisco In November

Top image: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to members of the media during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Altman delivered the keynote address at the first ever Open AI DevDay conference. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)