Tech
What does OpenAI’s restructuring mean for the future of the AI industry?
OpenAI’s recent restructuring of its for-profit arm to a public benefit corporation is a smart move that will allow the organization to increase its investment opportunities and maintain its nonprofit roots, according to a Northeastern University nonprofit management expert.
“They are still keeping their nonprofit legacy intact in many ways,” says Cortney Nicolato, a Northeastern lecturer and president and chief executive of the United Way of Rhode Island, a branch of a global nonprofit that provides and funds social service programs to people in need.
OpenAI recently announced after months of negotiations between attorneys general in Delaware, where it was incorporated, and California, where it is currently based, that it had changed the organization’s structure.
As part of the reorganization, OpenAI, the well-known AI technology company, changed its for-profit business into a public benefit corporation. A public benefit corporation is a type of for-profit business that, in addition to having shareholders, has committed to pursuing societal causes.
OpenAI’s recently renamed nonprofit arm, the OpenAI Foundation, has a 26% equity stake in the company. Microsoft, which has long been one of the company’s biggest supporters, has a 27% equity stake in the company. The other 47% equity stake is owned by employees, previous employees, and current and new investors, according to an OpenAI blog post.
Nicolato says OpenAI’s pivot to a public benefit corporation makes sense as it is increasingly becoming one of the more popular business models for companies looking to make societal changes.
Similarly, Anthropic, another AI company, is a public benefit corporation.
Other companies that follow a similar structure are Bombas, which in addition to selling socks, also gives them away; Toms Shoes, which gives away a free pair of shoes for every pair sold. They are what are known as B Corporations, which, similar to public benefit corporations, have a social component to their for-profit businesses.
“There are a lot more B Corps now than there were before,” says Nicolato. “So I’m not surprised that they went this route because it offers more opportunity to license out products.”
At the same time, however, given that the nonprofit’s arm retains a large stake in the private arm, it means it is still acting as a check on the organization as a whole, she says.
In addition to the restructuring, OpenAI announced that it is investing $25 billion for the nonprofit arm to focus on two specific areas—health care and AI resilience.
“I think what they’ve done with their nonprofit arm is really hone exactly what that nonprofit will be focused on,” she says.
But why did OpenAI do this restructuring in the first place? What are the economic benefits?
Gastón de los Reyes, an international business and strategy professor at Northeastern University, says this new restructuring significantly increases OpenAI’s capital investment opportunities as it continues to spend billions on the development of its AI technologies.
“What this change allows is for a lot more investors to be able to make huge amounts of money by owning a share of OpenAI,” he says.
Specifically, this new structure positions OpenAI for a potential initial public offering and removes a previous profit cap for investors, he explains.
“The floodgates of the capital have been opened to keep this arms race going between OpenAI, Google and Anthropic,” he says, highlighting the companies’ pursuit of artificial general intelligence, a form of AI that is cognitively as capable or more capable than humans.
Notably, OpenAI was incentivized to create the new corporate structure to take full advantage of an investment from the Japanese conglomerate Softbank, de los Reyes says.
Speaking to the nonprofit’s now massive $130 billion stake in the for-profit arm, Craig Welton, also a Northeastern lecturer and the chief development officer of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dorchester, a local branch of the national after-school organization, says the potential societal benefits are massive.
“It will probably be the most well-funded foundation in the country when it’s all said and done,” he says.
Whether the organization actually lives up to its goals will certainly depend on its nonprofit and for-profit boards in maintaining OpenAI’s stated missions and goals, he says.
This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.
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Tech
6 Great After-Christmas Deals to Spend Your Gift Cards On
After-Christmas deals are an excellent way to redeem any gift cards or cash you got for Christmas. You can purchase something you actually want, and you can do it for less money than usual. I’ve scoured the Internet for truly good after-Christmas deals on the gear that we’ve hand-tested on the WIRED Reviews team. Many of these sales will end this weekend, so keep that in mind while you’re shopping. Find all the highlights below.
For more inspiration, check out some of our recently updated buying guides, including the Best Office Chairs, the Best Cheap Phones, and the Best Space Heaters.
WIRED Featured Deals:
Anker Laptop Power Bank for $88 ($47 off)
We love this beefy power bank. Its 25,000-mAh capacity is more than enough for fully charging your iPhone between 4 and 6 times, and it can deliver up to 165 watts to two devices meaning that you can charge your laptop, gaming console, or anything else you fancy. The built-in USB-C cable doubles as a carrying loop. There’s also a nifty display that’ll give you at-a-glance information on remaining battery, temperature, charging speeds, and more. It has pass-through charging support and only takes about two hours to fully recharge. This deal price matches what we saw on Black Friday.
Google Pixel 10 for $599 ($200 off)
There was an on-page coupon (PIXEL10) that had the best price we’ve tracked for any of the phones in the Google Pixel 10 lineup. That coupon is not available as of Saturday morning, but it may be back—clip it if you see it. This is still a good deal on the smartest Android phones you can buy, with fantastic cameras, snappy processors, gorgeous displays, and more AI integration than the average person needs. Check out our dedicated buying guide to figure out which Google Pixel 10 is right for you. If you’re in the market for an upgrade, now is a good time to buy considering that we’ve never seen any phone in this flagship lineup sell for less.
Bruvi BV-01 Brewer Bundle for $228 ($120 off)—Clip the Coupon
I’ve tested a lot of pod coffee makers, and the Bruvi BV-01 is my favorite. This deal price is the best we see outside of special events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The brewer is cute and looks great on a counter, with a large reservoir, an intuitive touchscreen display, and a built-in wastebin that collects used pods for you. The best part are the proprietary B-Pods, which are designed to biodegrade in a landfill. The bundle gets you the machine plus an assortment of bestselling coffee and espresso pods to get you started.
Fitbit Charge 6 for $100 ($60 off)
The Fitbit Charge 6 has been at the top of our fitness tracker buying guide since we first tested it. It’s attractive, affordable, accessible, and on sale for a match of the best deal we’ve seen. It’ll play well with iOS and Android, and it has a solid suite of features that’ll cover almost anyone’s needs—including skin temperature, heart rate readings, ECGs, activity and workout tracking, and more. The battery lasts for at least a week on a single charge. This deal comes with a six-month subscription to Fitbit Premium, which normally costs $10 per month.
Hydro Flask Standard Mouth Water Bottle for $30 ($10 off)
This budget-friendly deal gets you a steal on the best reusable water bottle. Hydro Flask bottles are durable, portable, and easy to cover in all the stickers you’ve been hoarding. The handle is flexible, the bottle is leakproof, and every component is dishwasher safe (though you may want to opt for hand-washing if you do end up plastering it in stickers). A few different colors are on sale at this price.
Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 for $200 ($50 off)
If hitting the gym is one of your New Year’s resolutions for 2026, the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 are worth considering. They’re the best workout headphones we’ve tested thanks to their comfortable and ergonomic fit, noise cancelation, spatial audio, a heart rate monitor, and the fact that they play well with both iOS and Android phones. The sound is solid, the battery life is good, and they’re water-resistant. This deal price comes within $20 of the best we’ve seen. Every color—orange, lavender, grey, and black—is on sale.
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Tech
Hyperkin’s Competitor Upgrades the Xbox Controller by Copying Sony’s Design
The most immediately striking difference is that Hyperkin’s product swaps the typical Xbox approach of asymmetric thumbsticks for the PlayStation’s horizontal layout. It also separates the D-pad (it’s one piece inside the pad, but splits its cardinal directions so each appears to be its own button), while the ABXY face buttons are spaced slightly further apart. Where the DualSense’s touchpad would sit, we have the Xbox home, menu, view, and share buttons, all blended in rather smartly. An LED ring around the home button just about echoes the lights running the periphery of the DualSense’s touchpad, although it’s really more of an inversion of the regular Xbox controller, where the home button itself lights up.
The Competitor’s thumbsticks come equipped with thumbcaps that mirror the PS5’s, an outer ring with a convex central point, but a pair of Xbox-standard concave caps are included. These easily pop on and off, and can be mixed and matched, if you were so (strangely) inclined.
There are two areas where this departs from both the standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers in terms of inputs. The first is the presence of two programmable rear buttons, M1 and M2. By default, these duplicate the input of the A and B buttons, but holding down the Mode button between them lets you remap them. There are also physical button locks to prevent their use entirely. The other is that while the Competitor boasts a 3.5-mm headphone jack like Microsoft’s official pad, it adds a built-in audio mute button, hidden in the black between the thumbsticks—a nice little upgrade.
Oddly Familiar
In use, the Competitor feels … well, a lot like a PS5 pad. The slightly wider grip fits in the hand comfortably, all inputs are accessible, and those symmetrical thumbsticks sit nicely in reach for all but the smallest hands. A microtextured underside provides a solid grip that, when coupled with its 232-gram weight, makes the Competitor feel particularly suited to longer play periods. It’s all very familiar if you’re already a multiformat gamer, to the extent that it sometimes slightly threw my muscle memory off, reaching a thumb out to do a PlayStation touchpad function and finding only the Xbox system buttons.
Photograph: Matt Kamen
Tech
In Cryptoland, Memecoin Fever Gives Way to a Stablecoin Boom
When US president Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz.
Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment. The previous year, millions of new memecoins had flooded the market; a few, like Fartcoin, had rocketed to billion-dollar valuations. Pump.Fun, a platform for launching and trading memecoins, had become one of the fastest-growing crypto launchpad businesses ever. Now, the soon-to-be president was getting in on the act.
Over lunch on the second day of the conference, beneath the ornate stucco ceiling and golden chandeliers of the venue’s dining hall, I located a table designated for a conversation about memecoins. Whereas other tables were half full, the memecoin workshop was oversubscribed; latecomers pulled up chairs to create two full rows.
The discussion was led by Nagendra Bharatula, founder of investment firm G-20 Group. Bharatula had recently coauthored a paper arguing that memecoins, despite their juvenile spirit, had a place in professional investors’ portfolios. In the six months prior, a basket of 25 “bluechip memecoins”—an oxymoron if ever there was one—had outperformed bitcoin by 150 percent, he pointed out. Some of the attendees murmured their approval.
Since then, the shine has come off the memecoin market. The paper value of Trump’s coin, which climbed to a peak of $14 billion two days after its launch, has cratered to roughly $1 billion. Hundreds of thousands of small investors lost their shirts. Pump.Fun’s daily revenue, a proxy for the overall appetite for memecoin trading, is barely more than a tenth of what it was in January. The memecoin gold rush has spawned a raft of litigation.
Next up: the stablecoin. If memecoins are symbolic of reckless abandon and unflinching profiteering in cryptoland, stablecoins are a symbol of the industry’s search for purpose and respectability. Designed to hold a steady $1 valuation, stablecoins are pitched by proponents as a faster and cheaper way to make everyday payments and international money transfers.
In a year in which the US has declared itself open for crypto business, where previously crypto firms feared regulatory backlash under the Biden administration, stablecoins have supplanted memecoins as the coin à la mode—and punctured the mainstream.
Though stablecoins have been around since 2014, they have predominantly been used by crypto traders as a safe harbor during bouts of market volatility, not by regular people. The concept has also faced resistance from regulators skeptical of a new form of money; Diem, a stablecoin venture incubated at Meta, famously shuttered in 2022 in the face of broad-based opposition.
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