OpenAI, the non-profit AI research lab created in 2015, won’t be so open somewhere down the road. The company has re-established itself as a “capped-profit” company — a hybrid of a for-profit and non-profit.

The company says it needs to “invest billions of dollars in upcoming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers”.

In order to raise capital while still focusing on its mission, the company decided to restructure itself as OpenAI LP. With this change, the company’s “day-to-day work is not changing”. It will continue its focus exclusively on developing new AI technologies and not commercial products.

“Our structure gives us flexibility for how to create a return in the long term, but we hope to figure that out only once we’ve created safe AGI,” the company explained.

The new entity will be led by Sam Altman as CEO. Greg Brockman will be the CTO while Ilya Sutskever will serve as chief scientist of OpenAI LP.

It is interesting to note here that Altman very recently stepped down as president of Y Combinator to “spend more time focusing on OpenAI”.