Open AI's governance structure, a non-profit board with a mission to benefit humanity,

overseeing a for-profit arm backed by Microsoft, why that might just be typical Silicon Valley and how it caused a mess in the valley.

It's Tuesday November 21st. Welcome to Tech Check. I am Deirdre Bosa with Mark Gilbert on another action-packed day Gilbert.

I know the fallout from Open AI continues. We talked about the corporate structure at Open AI yesterday, but today we're

going to go a little deeper because it's actually not all that unusual in Silicon Valley

and reveals a lot about the tensions that occur all the time between investors, Wall Street, and founders, companies, San Francisco culture.

Yeah, I found myself thinking a lot about this this morning, especially, you know,

talking to some of our East Coast colleagues who couldn't believe that the structure

existed in the first place. And, you know, it is surprising because we're in the business of covering

for profit companies and stocks that settle every single day that is

C. M. B. C. B. C.'s bread and butter. So open AI's non-profit structure,

it's a very novel, unusual, high-minded,

and maybe what we're finding out now,

maybe untenable concept, but we have to go back to the idea too that this is

Silicon Valley in a nutshell. Silicon Valley has operated on these high-minded ideas of doing something special and different for decades, right?

Disruption, world-changing ideas. A lot of them don't work out, but you don't hear about a lot that don't work out, and they certainly don't implode the way that open AI has over the last few days.

Right, and we're going to talk about Silicon Valley specifically, but I think a lot of corporate America has little anachronisms like this for whatever reason, you know, for historical reasons, for boosting morale, for elevating the mission of the company.

You know, I think about Goldman Sachs, right?

Goldman Sachs was a partnership that then went, you know,

it had a partnership structure with partners who shared in the profits of the the business and then it went public and now it just has

shareholders and it's supposed to be run like any other business but it maintains this sort of

vestiges of of a partnership business and it's just because that's the culture of the firm.

...