OpenAI’s For-Profit Shift: What It Means for Business Leaders

The reality of AI’s resource demands might change how you use AI. Plus: Sam Altman on AI in 2025 and how to automate news summaries with Zapier.

Welcome to Stay Ahead #57 from FlexOS!

Every Wednesday, we share the latest tools and tips to help you work smarter, not harder.

First of all, I wish you and your loved ones a bright and inspiring start to the New Year, filled with warmth, joy, and endless possibilities. This time of year invites us to reflect, recharge, and explore new ideas—and that’s exactly what we’re discussing this week:

1. News of the Week: AI advancement is not just a technical race, but a money one.
2. Prompt and Guide: How to automate the news summaries by Zapier in 5 steps.
3. Must-read News:  Sam Altman on what to expect in 2025.

Let’s dive in!

AI advancement needs more resources than we have ever imagined

The biggest announcement from OpenAI before 2025 is not its new model nor ChatGPT-5, but a fundamental change in its structure—an attempt to become a for-profit company.

While articles have discussed Elon Musk’s (and more recently Meta’s) ongoing lawsuits against OpenAI’s for-profit transition, few have explored the reasons behind this change, how it came to be, and its broader implications for the AI race and users. 

With 2025 poised to be another transformative year for AI, unpacking this case study can help us better understand the landscape and reflect on the product we are using. In a nutshell:

• 2015: OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab with the goal of making AI research available to all. Early contributors included Elon Musk, Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud.
• 2019: OpenAI realized building AGI would require significant capital and decided to become more than just a lab. They created a for-profit arm controlled by the nonprofit, with a capped profit share for investors and employees. Microsoft invested $1 billion.
• 2022: OpenAI’s ChatGPT was launched.
• Late 2024: OpenAI announced plans to transition its existing for-profit into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), with ordinary shares of stock and the OpenAI mission as its public benefit interest.
• November 2024: Musk filed a lawsuit to block OpenAI's for-profit transition.
• December 2024: Meta and Encode support Musk’s lawsuit. 

While PBCs allow companies to combine profit-making with a commitment to the public interest (examples include xAI and Anthropic), the pushback against OpenAI’s transition is rooted in trust:

• Elon Musk claims OpenAI is abandoning its original mission of AI for humanity and extracting promises from investors not to fund rivals like xAI.
  • This controversy was related to the departure of key OpenAI executives, which further damaged perceptions of its mission consistency.
• Meta argues that the initial non-profit entity had given OpenAI an advantage in securing resources and donations (such as tax benefits), and allowing this transition would give its nonprofit-acquired resources an unfair advantage over traditional for-profit competitors.
• Encode claims that OpenAI’s PBC plan would “evaporate” its duty to humanity because Delaware law doesn’t require PBCs to serve the public interest.

What I’m more interested in, though, is the reason OpenAI gave for this transition:

• In 2019, OpenAI estimated they would need to raise $10B to build AGI, recognizing that nonprofit structures limited their ability to attract large investors.
• The o-series models, requiring not just training compute (used for creating AI models) but also thinking compute (used for reasoning or running these models effectively) and the increasing competition made OpenAI “once again need to raise more capital than we’d imagined”. 
• OpenAI reports losing $5 billion in one year while still lacking computing resources.

The fact that OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini offer their products for free or at low prices conceals the reality of the massive financial and environmental resources required to keep these models running. $200 for ChatGPT Pro is just a start.

AI advancement is not just a technical race, but also a big math equation of how we can play this game in the long run, at the cost of resources depleting at a rapid pace. As we step into 2025, the question for companies is this: how will you balance pushing the boundaries of innovation with the responsibility of sustaining the very resources that make it possible?

Prompts and Tutorials

In 5 Steps: Summarize All Your Newsletters in One Doc with Zapier

Managing a flood of newsletters can be overwhelming, but with Zapier, you can effortlessly organize, summarize, and store them in a single document. This simple 5-step process will help you streamline your workflow and keep all key information at your fingertips.

• Step 1: Label the emails you want to have the summary for
• Step 2: Add labeled emails in Zapier
• Step 3: Summarize emails using Zapier AI
• Step 4: Append the summary in your Docs
• Step 5: Expand the automation and use cases

With the power of ChatGPT and Zapier, you can save hours every week by automating email responses. This guide will walk you through a simple, 5-step process to set up an automated email reply system that still feels personal and professional.

‍→ Read more news at the end.

Need more AI Tools? Check out

The best AI tools for Recruiting, Marketing, Accounting, and HR.

​10 Tools Anyone Can Use (Writing, Powerpoints)

​10 AI Productivity Tools (Meeting Notetaking, Writing, Brainstorming.)

Our full AI For Work Top 100

Create better prompts with our GPT Prompt Generator

Every week, we pick must-read articles about the future of work so you can stay ahead.

OpenAI's Altman: Here's what to expect from AI in 2025‍

Sam Altman’s predictions for AI advancements in 2025, focusing on how AI will transform industries and daily life.

ChatGPT Search can be tricked into misleading users, new research reveals

New research reveals that ChatGPT's search capabilities can be exploited to mislead users, highlighting potential risks in AI-driven search tools.

Google CEO says AI model Gemini will the company’s ‘biggest focus’ in 2025​

Google CEO declares AI model Gemini as the company’s top focus for 2025, underscoring its ambition to lead the next phase of AI innovation.

Leaders Shouldn’t Try to Do It All

The article advises leaders to avoid taking on everything themselves, emphasizing the importance of delegation and prioritization in achieving organizational success.

What CIOs Read in 2024

CIOs in 2024 focused their reading on AI's evolving impact on business, technology strategies, and leadership practices, shaping how they guide their organizations.