It’s been a busy week for Elon Musk. He says he’s saving taxpayers billions of dollars (though outlays from the Treasury Department are public and make it pretty clear he hasn’t); he bragged that he fed USAID “into the woodchipper,” an aide on his Department of Government Efficiency was revealed to have said this summer to “normalize Indian hate,” resigned, and was then rehired.

So you’d be forgiven for having missed, amid all the chaos, Musk’s $97 billion offer to purchase “all assets of OpenAI Inc.,” especially since OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately and emphatically rejected it.

But as we all learned from the Twitter saga, it pays to take Musk’s takeover bids seriously — and while this one almost certainly won’t happen, it may still have big implications for perhaps the most important company in artificial intelligence.

OpenAI’s nonprofit to for-profit transition

To make sense of Musk’s out-of-nowhere bid for OpenAI, you need some background on OpenAI’s controversial conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit company.

OpenAI was initially founded as a nonprofit, with the mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” But, the company came to argue, it became increasingly clear that to make powerful AI — and OpenAI has set its sights high, wanting to develop “superintelligence”’........

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