> A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders.
There is theory and there is reality. If someone is paying your bills by an outsized amount and they say jump, you will say how high.
The influence is rarely that explicit though. The board knowing that X investor provides 60% of their funding, for instance, means the board is incentivized to do things that keep X investor happy without X having to ask for it.
9 times out of 10, money drives decisions in a captilist environment
OpenAI hasn’t received much funding from Microsoft or other investors, and is profitable already with no lack of interested suitors for funding and partnership. Microsoft’s leverage is grossly overstated mostly because it suits Microsoft to appear important to OpenAI when it’s the other way around.
They received a 10 billion dollar investment that allows the product to operate plus they provide the servers. Without that your $20 a month goes to 2,000
They received much less than 10 billion, and it's mostly in credits (so really about half the value), in exchange for exclusive access to the world's most advanced LLM?
They’ve actually drawn very little of that $10b. They are profitable at the moment, and would have no trouble raising funds from anywhere at the moment in any quantity they wanted.
There is theory and there is reality. If someone is paying your bills by an outsized amount and they say jump, you will say how high.
The influence is rarely that explicit though. The board knowing that X investor provides 60% of their funding, for instance, means the board is incentivized to do things that keep X investor happy without X having to ask for it.
9 times out of 10, money drives decisions in a captilist environment