Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, once again has a seat at the table (or rather, on the board of directors).
OpenAI today Announced that Altman will rejoin the company’s board of directors several months later lose your seat and be expelled as CEO of OpenAI.
He is joined by three new members: former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former Sony Entertainment President Nicole Seligman, and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, elevating the board OpenAI board of directors to eight people.
Members of the transition board (the board formed after Altman’s firing in November) will not resign with the appointment of Desmond-Hellmann, Seligman and Simo. Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor (current chairman of OpenAI), Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, and Larry Summers, an economist and former president of Harvard, will remain in their roles on the board, as will than Dee Templeton, a Microsoft-appointed board observer. .
The appointment of the four new board members (and Altman’s re-election) comes after OpenAI received criticism for the all-male makeup of its board and the nomination of Summers, who has a history of making unflattering comments about women. The Congressional Black Caucus marked the board’s lack of diversity in a letter sent in January, noting the importance of the Black perspective in creating tools to help mitigate AI bias.
OpenAI’s expanded board of directors is certainly diverse, at least in terms of their backgrounds.
Desmond-Hellmann, in addition to leading the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for six years, was previously chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco and previously president of product development at Genentech, where she helped develop gene-targeted cancer drugs. Desmond-Hellmann is an oncologist by training, certified in both internal medicine and medical oncology.
Seligman, an attorney and corporate director, received national attention for her representation of Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings and President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial. Seligman was a venture capitalist and general counsel for Sony before rising through the ranks to become CEO of Sony Corporation and president of Sony Corporation of America.
As for Fidji Simo, before becoming CEO of Instacart, she was the head of Facebook’s app at Meta and a vice president overseeing Meta’s various videos, games, and monetization efforts. Simo she also co-founded (and is currently president of) the Metrodora Foundation, a health clinic and research institute.
“Sue, Fidji, and Nicole have experience leading global organizations and navigating complex regulatory environments, including experience in technology, nonprofit, and board governance,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “They will work closely with current board members Adam D’Angelo, Larry Summers and Bret Taylor, as well as Sam and OpenAI senior management.”
The board expansion and Altman’s reinstatement also follows an investigation by law firm WilmerHale, retained by OpenAI, which concluded that Altman’s removal was a “consequence of a breakdown in the relationship and loss of trust ” between Altman and the previous board, not because of “concerns regarding product safety, the pace of development, OpenAI’s finances, or its disclosure to investors, customers or business partners.”
OpenAI in a blog post He said that during the investigation, WilmerHale conducted dozens of interviews with the company’s former board, current executives, advisors and other witnesses and reviewed thousands of documents and other corporate actions. In the firm’s view, the previous board acted within its right to fire Altman, but Altman’s conduct did not necessitate dismissal.
“We have unanimously concluded that Sam and [OpenAI president Greg Brockman] “They are the right leaders for OpenAI,” Taylor said in a statement. “We recognize the magnitude of our role in managing transformative technologies for the global good.”
Probably not everyone at OpenAI would agree.
New York Times inform earlier this week painted a picture of a manipulative Altman: a leader who often told people what they wanted to hear to seduce them into supporting his decisions, but who undermined their credibility when challenged. Both OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever, a former OpenAI board member and the startup’s chief scientist, reached out to former OpenAI board members to express concern about Altman’s behavior ahead of his dismissal last year, according to The Times.
In addition to today’s board appointments, OpenAI said it would adopt a new set of corporate governance guidelines, including strengthening its conflict of interest policy, creating a whistleblowing hotline “to serve as an anonymous reporting resource for all OpenAI employees and contractors” and the establishment of additional board committees, including a mission and strategy committee “focused on the implementation and advancement of OpenAI’s core mission.”
We have asked OpenAI for more information about the reworked conflict of interest policy and mission and strategy committee and will update this post if we receive a response.