On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the high-profile AI company behind the viral chatbot ChatGPIT, suddenly and publicly ousted its CEO Sam Altman. The announcement came a day after he made a public appearance on behalf of his company at Thursday’s APEC CEO summit.
OpenAI’s board said it conducted “a thoughtful review process” and that Altman “was not consistently clear in his communications with the board, which hindered its ability to carry out its responsibilities.”
“The Board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI,” the board statement continued.
As of this week, OpenAI’s six-person board included OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, who is also chairman of the board; Ilya Sutskever, Chief Scientist at OpenAI; Adam D’Angelo; Tasha McCauley; Helen Toner; And Altman himself. The company began publicly posting the list of its board members on its website in July, following the departures of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Neuralink director Shivon Zilis and former Texas Congressman Will Hurd.
Here are details of the board behind the controversial shake-up:
Greg Brockman: OpenAI co-founder Brockman left his role at the company on Friday in protest of Altman’s ouster, saying publicly, “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today.” Brockman spent five years as Stripe’s CTO before helping launch OpenAI. In 2020, Brockman said that the biggest obstacle to OpenAI’s first five years was the idea that making public the full extent of the startup’s work was not necessary for humanity in his eyes. At the time, he said, “We realized that as these things become powerful, they become dual-use… and we have a responsibility as technology developers to not just say, ‘Hey, We’ve built this thing, it’s ready’ for the world to decide how to use it.”
Ilya Sutskever: As of now, Sutskever is the only remaining OpenAI co-founder on the board. After co-founding DNNResearch – an AI startup focused on neural networks – and selling it Google, Sutskever joined Google as a research scientist and stayed for about three years before moving to OpenAI as co-founder and research director. Since November 2018, he is the company’s chief scientist.
Adam D’Angelo: D’Angelo, the current CEO of Quora, a social platform for questions and answers, spent nearly four years Facebook and was the CTO of the tech giant from 2006 to 2008. He is not an employee of OpenAI.
Tasha McCauley: McCauley, who is not an OpenAI employee, is on the boards of directors of both OpenAI and geospatial tech company GeoSim Systems. He is an associate senior management scientist at the RAND Corporation and has been on the OpenAI board since 2018.
Helen Toner: Toner is a board member and non-OpenAI employee who has spent time at the University of Oxford’s Center for the Governance of AI, and has been director of strategy for Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology for nearly five years. Last year, Toner told the Journal of Political Risk that, “Building secure, trustworthy, fair, and explainable AI systems is a big open problem… Organizations building and deploying AI also need to recognize that they “We are beating our competitors in the market.” — or on the battlefield — it’s no use if the systems they’re using are broken, hackable or unpredictable.”
earlier this year, Microsoft’s According to PitchBook, the expanded investment in OpenAI – an additional $10 billion – made it the largest AI investment of the year. In April, the startup reportedly closed a $300 million share sale at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion, which included investments from companies like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. However, despite its significant investment, Microsoft does not have any board seats in OpenAI.
OpenAI has publicly stated, “Although our partnership with Microsoft involves an investment of billions of dollars, OpenAI remains a completely independent company governed by the OpenAI nonprofit.” “Microsoft has no board seat and no control. And…AGI is explicitly excluded from all commercial and IP licensing agreements. These arrangements exemplify how we have allowed Microsoft to And why chose as commercial partner.”
Microsoft had no new comment to add Saturday and requests for comment from board members were not immediately returned to CNBC.
OpenAI’s product feature announcements earlier this month showed that one of the tech sector’s hottest companies is rapidly evolving its offering in an effort to stay ahead of rivals like Anthropic. Google And meta In the AI arms race.
ChatGPT, which broke records as the fastest-growing consumer app in history just months after its launch, now has nearly 100 million weekly active users, OpenAI said this month. According to Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO-turned-interim CEO, more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform, up from 80% in August, and they span industries like financial services, legal applications, and education .
News of Altman’s ouster comes after OpenAI’s Dave Day, the company’s first in-person event on November 6, which also included a surprise appearance from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“The systems that are needed as you move forward aggressively on our roadmap need us to be at the top of our game, and we intend to fully commit ourselves to ensuring that That you all have… not only the best systems for training and inference, but also the most computation,” Nadella told Altman while they were on stage together at Dev Day. He added, “That’s how we make progress. do.”
That day, Altman told Nadella, “I think we have the best partnership in tech and I’m excited to build AGI together.”
As recently as last month, OpenAI was reportedly in talks to close a deal that would lead to a valuation of $80 billion. When CNBC asked OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap about that deal, he declined to comment.
At OpenAI’s Dave Day, in response to a question from CNBC about GPT-5, Altman said, “We want to do it, but we don’t have a timeline.”
