OpenAI names new board with Microsoft as non-voting partner

The new board consists of three members so far: Bret Taylor, the chair of the board and the president and chief operating officer of Salesforce; Larry Summers, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary and a professor at Harvard University; and Adam D’Angelo, the co-founder and CEO of Quora and the only remaining holdout from the previous board.

One notable aspect of the new board is that it does not include any women. The board previously had two female members: Helen Toner, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and an expert on AI policy, who was removed following the return of Sam Altman as CEO; and Shivon Zilis, the director of Neuralink, another Elon Musk-founded company that aims to connect human brains with computers, who quit much earlier this year.

However, Altman’s letter on the new board appointments, published on the OpenAI blog today, notes that the current all-male board “will be working very hard on the extremely important task of building out a board of diverse perspectives.”

Whether this suggests the addition of women or other gender-identifying persons at a later date remains to be seen.

Dramatic series of events

The announcement comes after a dramatic series of events that began on November 18, just days before the Thanksgiving holiday, when the previous board, composed of Altman, Brockman, D’Angelo and Toner, abruptly dismissed Altman as the CEO of OpenAI, citing a lack of candor and confidence in his leadership. 

Altman, who had co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and led its transformation from a nonprofit research lab into a world-renowned commercial startup, was shocked and saddened by the decision.

The next day, Microsoft, which had been a close partner of OpenAI and had invested billions of dollars in it, announced that it had hired Altman and Brockman, who had quit in protest, to lead its new advanced AI research team.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he was “extremely excited” to bring on the pair and looked “forward to getting to know” the new management team at OpenAI.

On Monday, November 20, more than 500 of OpenAI’s employees, including other top executives, threatened to quit unless they got Altman back and the current board resigned. They wrote an open letter to the board, accusing them of betraying the vision and values of OpenAI and jeopardizing the future of artificial intelligence. They also demanded an independent investigation into the circumstances of Altman’s firing and the board’s actions.

New challenges for the new board

The new board faces a number of challenges and opportunities as they take over the helm of one of the most influential and innovative AI companies in the world.

They will have to balance the competing demands of advancing the frontiers of AI research and development, while ensuring the safety, accountability and transparency of their products and processes, as well as calls for increased diversity and female perspectives — even as prominent women have come forward expressing disinterest in the board seats at such a chaotic company. It probably does not help matters that Altman’s adult sister has publicly leveled accusations of childhood abuse toward him, though OpenAI has yet to address those other than to tell VentureBeat earlier they did not play a role in his initial firing.

The new OpenAI board will also have to deal with the competition with other major AI players, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and IBM, as well as the regulatory and policy issues that affect the AI industry and society at large.

In addition, they must confront reports that OpenAI has internally made a potentially dangerous breakthrough on its quest towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) via a model known as Q* (Q star). Many at OpenAI and the wider AI research community share fears about AI superintelligence posing an existential risk (or “x risk”) to human civilization if and when it emerges, because it will be theoretically able to outsmart most people and act of its accord, which may not be one that prioritizes human life or safety. Some rumors have suggested that concerns of such existential risk may have been a driving factor in Altman’s initial firing.

And still, to this day, the question remains: why did the old board decide it was such an urgent priority to remove Altman — by most public accounts, a beloved and effective leader of the most successful generative AI company in the world to date? What was Altman not “consistently candid” with the old board about?

This story is developing…