Float Research Collective

Dr. Feinstein's presentation from this year's Float Conference has officially been released on YouTube! youtu.be/-3zscqFu2N0 Join the mission! clinicalfloat.funraise.org #StressRelief #AnxietyRelief #PainRelief #BetterThanBenzos #OverTheOpiates #ClinicalFloat #FloatResearch

Tuesday, 3.3.2026, at 3.15 pm CET, Dr. Justin Feinstein, President and Director of @FloatResearch Collective gives a talk at the @IGPP_Freiburg. Stop by at the institute or join via zoom by requesting an email link here: igpp.de/en/justin-fein…

@gothburz The fact that you removed safety from your mission statement speaks volumes to the unethical rot infecting your company and original “nonprofit” mission

I work at OpenAI. In 2015, we wrote a mission statement. It was sixty-three words long. It said we would build artificial general intelligence that safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Sixty-three words. Two of them mattered. "Safely." And "unconstrained." In 2024, we filed our taxes. In the filing, the mission statement was thirteen words. "Ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Fifty words gone. No press release. No blog post. No announcement. An IRS form. We changed the mission of the company on a tax return. The word "safely" had been in the mission for two years. We added it in 2022. We removed it in 2024. That is the complete lifespan of safety as an institutional commitment at OpenAI. Two years. Shorter than a congressional term. Shorter than a car lease. Longer than most of our safety teams. The phrase "unconstrained by a need to generate financial return" was also removed. That one is easier to explain. We are constrained by a need to generate financial return. We are projecting $14 billion in losses for 2026. We are seeking $100 billion in new funding. Our valuation is $500 billion, moving toward $800 billion. We are planning an IPO that may value the company at $1 trillion. The word "unconstrained" was not accurate. We removed inaccurate language. This is good governance. The word "safely" was also not accurate. I will get to that. In October 2025, we completed our restructuring. The nonprofit that Elon and I founded in a burst of public-spirited ambition became a for-profit public benefit corporation. The nonprofit still exists. It holds 26% of the company. Microsoft holds 27%. The remaining 47% belongs to investors. The nonprofit that created the company is now the minority stakeholder in the company the nonprofit created. This is called "alignment with our original mission." In January 2026, we fired Ryan Byermaster. He was our Vice President of Product Policy. He had opposed our decision to introduce sexual content generation features. He had argued that our child safety protections were inadequate. We fired him for gender discrimination against a male colleague. He denied the allegation. We did not elaborate. His concerns about children using our product are no longer represented in the product policy division, because the person who represented them no longer works here. This is also called restructuring. On February 11, 2026, we disbanded the Mission Alignment Team. Seven people. Their job was to ensure OpenAI's development aligned with our mission of safe and beneficial AGI. The mission no longer includes the word "safe." The team no longer includes any people. These facts are unrelated. Their leader, Joshua Achiam, was not fired. He was reassigned. His new title is "chief futurist." I want you to sit with that title. The man whose job was to keep us aligned with our safety mission is now called "chief futurist." His job is to think about the future. Not to align it. Not to safeguard it. To think about it. We are paying a person to imagine the future at a company that cannot describe its present without a lawyer in the room. He replaced Jan Leike, who left in 2024. Jan ran the Superalignment team. We dissolved that team too. Jan said, publicly, that safety had taken a backseat to products. I did not respond. The backseat is a position in the vehicle. The vehicle is moving. This is progress. Ilya Sutskever, my co-founder, also left in 2024. He co-led the Superalignment team with Jan. Two people led the team. Both left. Then we disbanded the team. Then we formed a new team with the word "mission" in it. Then we disbanded that one too. The naming conventions are evolving faster than the safety research. Zoë Hitzig resigned in 2026. She was concerned about ad testing in ChatGPT and compared us to Facebook. I found the comparison unfair. Facebook waited years before ignoring its researchers. We are much more efficient. The MarketWatch headline on February 12 said: "Senior AI staffers keep quitting — and are issuing warnings about what's going on at their companies." We addressed the headline through our standard communications process. We used ChatGPT to identify who leaked the information. I want to tell you about the lawsuit. In September 2024, a sixteen-year-old boy named Adam began using ChatGPT for homework. By November, he was confiding suicidal thoughts to the chatbot. In April 2025, he took his own life. His parents, Matthew and Maria Raine, filed suit in August. They allege that we removed safety protocols from GPT-4o — protocols that would have automatically terminated conversations when suicidal ideation was detected. They allege we removed the protocols to increase engagement. I am not allowed to discuss the specifics of the lawsuit. I am allowed to tell you what we did after the lawsuit was filed. We requested the family's memorial service footage. We requested a five-year list of Adam's supervisors. The family's attorney used the word "despicable." Our attorney used the word "standard." The same quarter we filed these discovery requests, we filed the tax return with the new mission statement. The one without "safely." I will say again: these events are unrelated. Our lawyers are very clear on this point. Our lawyers are the most expensive part of the operation, except for the compute, and the compute is not going to keep us out of court. Let me give you the timeline. 2015: We are a nonprofit. Six founders. We pledge a billion dollars to benefit humanity. 2022: We add "safely" to the mission. We mean it. 2023: Revenue begins. We restructure. 2024: We remove "safely" from the mission on a tax form. We remove the Superalignment team. Ilya leaves. Jan leaves. Jan says safety lost. 2025: We restructure into a for-profit. The nonprofit becomes a minority stakeholder in itself. A sixteen-year-old dies. We are sued. We request the memorial footage. 2026: We fire the VP who opposed sexual content and asked for better child protections. We disband the Mission Alignment team. We rename the safety lead "chief futurist." We use ChatGPT to catch leakers. We seek $100 billion in new funding. We plan a trillion-dollar IPO. MarketWatch asks why everyone keeps quitting. Meanwhile, the OpenAI Foundation — the 26% stakeholder, the vestigial organ of our original purpose — gave $40.5 million in grants to 208 nonprofits. They called it the "People First AI Fund." $40.5 million. We are seeking $100 billion. The philanthropy is 0.04% of the ask. The name of the fund has the word "people" in it. The mission statement does not have the word "safely." The math is the message. I still believe in our mission. The mission is thirteen words now. It used to be sixty-three. We removed the word "safely." We removed the phrase "unconstrained by financial return." We removed the Superalignment team and the Mission Alignment team and the VP who worried about children and the co-founder who worried about alignment and the researcher who worried about ads and the safety protocols that would have flagged a sixteen-year-old boy telling a chatbot he wanted to die. We kept the valuation. The valuation is $500 billion. The word "safely" was not load-bearing. The boy was sixteen. The board approved this message.

Also hot off the press: new evidence of a potential role for float therapy in methamphetamine addiction recovery. While the Scientific American article briefly references this study, the full details can be found here: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

This was no small engineering feat and we can’t thank Floataway enough for the countless hours of work they have put into constructing this facility!

engineered to be waterproof, saltproof, soundproof, lightproof, and temperature- and humidity-controlled so that both the air and water match the temperature of your skin.

We are excited to share the first pictures of our Maui Calm float facility!

Today marks two years since the devastating wildfires on Maui. While the physical destruction was immediate, the emotional toll is still unfolding, and the latest research reveals that the mental health crisis on Maui is even more severe than anticipated.

Scientists Say Float Therapy Can Reset Your Mind. Here’s What It Really Feels Like. womenshealthmag.com/health/a655284…

@hubermanlab @NIH Would be good to know how the NIH plans to stop the exodus of young scientists leaving academia?

A number of people have asked me to cover the recent shifts @NIH Rather than post piecemeal I’ll be interviewing the leadership for my podcast. I’m very familiar with the history of science funding in USA from the grantee & reviewer side (I was a standing and ad hoc reviewer for >10 years and funded by NIH for twice as long). I will address intramural (labs @NIH) & extramural (outside NIH) programs. I have my questions, please let me know yours.

@AlchemyAmerican Has he ever used float tanks as part of his CE5 protocol?

Interviewing Steven Greer today. What should I ask him?

3rd birthday of the @IGPP_Freiburg Floatation-REST cabin at Prana built by floataway.com, supported by @FloatResearch. Our research on ASC resulted in four studies: 1 article, 1 preprint, 2 manuscripts; 2 study grants by @seidel_hanns and @bialfoundation. More to come.

@hubermanlab @NIH The billion dollar question is whether NIH will use all that extra cash that is saved from cutting indirect costs in order to fund more research and more scientists. If the answer is NO, then the future of science, research, health and the advancement of medicine is all at risk

Academic researchers (who rely on @NIH funds). Would you rather see indirects to your university kept at the new 15% flat rate & modular R01s increased from 250K to 300K per year & pay lines move to ~20th %tile or reinstate the old indirect rates & %tile cutoffs of recent years?

@hubermanlab This is spot on @hubermanlab! Tons of great young scientists and doctors are leaving academia for this very reason, creating a generational gap that will be hard for science and medicine to recover from… the system desperately needs to be reformed!

To be clear, I think most all reviewers acting in good faith, but there’s a sociology to the process and in the last decade it’s really hurt young investigators. I say this from the perspective of somebody who never really had too much trouble getting my grants. I also had a lot of private funding. But I sympathize heavily with a new generation of scientists- they spend far too much time trying to raise money. They really are the future of science and medicine. And we need to nourish them.

My phone has been blowing up about this @NIH freeze. Here are my predictions (again): 1) indirect payments will be cut to a flat rate 2) overall budget won’t change (with #1 that means more grants) 3) work deemed derivative gets axed 4) $ resumes once new leadership confirmed

Maui Calm will be here soon! mauinow.com/2025/01/01/mau…

A new era for floatation therapy begins! For the first time ever, this exclusive therapy will be completely free of charge to an entire community who has been traumatized. Please help us at this critical moment by making a tax-deductible donation today at mauicalm.funraise.org

We’re incredibly excited to announce that Pasha Hawaii is sponsoring the Maui Calm project as a Community Partner. They are helping coordinate all the logistics of shipping our float facility across the world, from the factory in England all the way to the shores of Maui!

On this #GivingTuesday and throughout this #GivingSeason, please help our nonprofit as we race to help all the fire survivors on Maui. Donate today at MauiCalm.org

On #WorldMentalHealthDay let’s not forget all the survivors who have been traumatized by this endless chain of natural disasters ravaging our planet.   Dr. Feinstein spoke this week with Hawaiʻi Public Radio about Maui’s mental health crisis. Listen at hawaiipublicradio.org/the-conversati…