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1/ If you're curious about what the finances of running a world-class AI company looks like, you can get a sense by looking at IRS filings from @OpenAI, which we have available as recently as 2017. 
2/ The first number that jumps out is that they spent over $28M in a single year with a headcount of just 99 people. And here I thought software was supposed to be cheap to make! Employee compensation alone accounted for $15.7M in expenses (over $13M of which was salaries).
3/ Non-profits must publish compensation for their highest-paid employees and the numbers here are eye-popping. I suspect these types of disclosures are part of the motivation behind OpenAI deciding to transition to become a for-profit entity recently. openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
4/ How many graduate students defend their thesis, take a job at a non-profit, and make more than $500K in compensation all in the same year? Karpathy is now at Tesla, Kingma is at Google, Abbeel is at Berkeley--it's hard to keep people at those salaries!!
5/ Let's look at the next biggest expense: cloud computing. They spent almost $8M on cloud costs--this is AFTER AWS, "generously agreed to donate a large amount of compute to us" and in addition to their own GPU servers openai.com/blog/infrastru…
6/ And since it's Silicon Valley, the office has to cost over $2M/year in rent and related expenses for 99 people...absurdity!
7/ Anyway, this is called a Form 990. You can look up any non-profit's 990's with helpful tools like @propublica's Non-profit Explorer projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/. It's a fun way to spend an hour, at least.
8/ You won't find the document I'm referencing there, though. OpenAI's most recent 990 filing was rejected by the state of California for not complying with their requirement to have the finances independently audited. You can review it here: rct.doj.ca.gov/Verification/W….
9/ So if you want to start a world-class AI company, especially if you are headquartered in Silicon Valley, know what you're up against. It ain't cheap! vox.com/future-perfect…
P.S. @paulg this is part of why I disagree with your position that non-profits are like magnets for sociopaths. They have so much more formal/involuntary oversight than a normal for-profit does--why deal with all that hassle when you could shield yourself with a maze of LLCs?
