- Sam Altman is set to return to OpenAI, with a new board in place, the company announced Wednesday.
- Larry Summers and Bret Taylor will join, while Adam D’Angelo will stay on.
- Former board members Ilya Sutskever, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley are out.
Sam Altman is set to return to OpenAI with a new board consisting of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo, the company announced in an X post Wednesday.
We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.
We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 22, 2023
The shakeup sees the departure of former board members Ilya Sutskever, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley. OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment about their future with the company, sent outside regular business hours.
Bret Taylor will chair the board, per the company’s announcement. That role was previously held by OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman, who resigned from the board in solidarity with Altman on Friday.
Here’s a run-down of the new board, and what they’ve said about AI.
Bret Taylor
Taylor is a Silicon Valley veteran, having held stints at Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce. He was the chair of Twitter’s board leading up to Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company last year. Until January this year, he was also co-CEO of Salesforce.
After leaving Salesforce, Taylor launched his own AI startup with Clay Bavor, who was previously vice-president of Google Labs. The Information reported in June that Taylor had raised at least $20 million for his new venture, at a valuation of more than $100 million.
Announcing his venture on LinkedIn in February, Taylor said about AI: “Rarely do you encounter a new technology so powerful that it feels inevitable that it will change the course of every industry.” He also compared the technology to Apple’s iPhone and the creation of the internet browser.
Taylor was proposed as one of the potential candidates to join the board in the open letter signed by nearly all of OpenAI’s employees, who’d threatened to quit if the board members did not resign themselves and reinstate Altman.
Larry Summers
Larry Summers is an economist who was Treasury Secretary from 1999 to 2001 and president of Harvard university. He’s also been outspoken about AI’s threat to jobs and the threats it could pose.
AI will change humanity.@VIVATech in Paris last Friday with @LaurenceParisot, I said: Since the enlightenment, we have lived in a world that has been defined so much by IQ–by cognitive processing, by developing new ideas, by bringing to bear knowledge. https://t.co/aLKph9WEla
— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) June 20, 2023
“AI is coming for the cognitive class. Part of the reason you’re seeing such hysteria now is that it’s the people who write articles and their friends,” Summers told Bloomberg in July.
He also forecast “restrictionist and protectionist policies that limit our ability to benefit from these technologies or slow down” the development of AI, in a March interview with GZERO Media,
Adam D’Angelo
D’Angelo is the only existing board member to stay on.
He is the cofounder and CEO of Quora, a question-and-answer website, was previously chief technology officer of Facebook, and joined OpenAI’s board in 2018.
The Information reported on Tuesday that D’Angelo had a reputation for stubbornness and being unwilling to change his position, citing Quora employees.
Tech reporter Kara Swisher posted on X on Tuesday that D’Angelo and interim CEO Emmett Shear were representing the old board in negotiations with Altman and his team.
In February, D’Angelo announced that Quora was launching Poe, a chatbot app powered by AI models made by OpenAI and others such as rival AI company Anthropic.
