Effective altruism, eh?
The risk is that he’s too confident and screws it up. Or continues on the growth path and becomes the person everyone seems to accuse him of being. But I think he’s not interested in petty shit, scratching around for a few bucks. Why, when you can (try) save the world.
If you need money to run the publicly released thing you underpriced to seize market share...
... you could also just, not?
And stick to research and releasing results.
At what point does it stop being "necessary" for OpenAI to do bad things to stay competitive and start being about them just running the standard VC playbook underneath a non-profit umbrella?
After ChatGPT was not released to the public, every for-profit raced to reproduce and improve on it. The decision not to release early and often with a restrictive license helped create that competition for funds and talent. If the company had been truly open, competition would have either had the choice of moving quickly, spending less money and contributing to the common core, or spending more money, going slower as they clean room implement the open code they can't use, and trying to compete alone. This might have been a huge win for the open source model, making the profitable decision to be to contribute to the commons.