OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once again has a seat at the table, or rather, a board seat.
OpenAI announced today that Altman will rejoin the company’s board of directors, months after losing his seat and being ousted as OpenAI’s CEO.
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, bringing the OpenAI board to seven members people.
Members of the interim board, which was established after Altman was fired in November, will not resign in response to the appointments of Desmond-Hellmann, Seligman and Simo. Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor (current chairman of the board of OpenAI), Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and economist and former Harvard University President Larry Summers will continue to serve on the board, as will Microsoft-appointed board observer Dee Templeton .
The appointments of the four new board members and Altman’s reappointment come after OpenAI faced criticism for its all-male board and the nomination of Summers, who has a history of making lewd comments about women. The Congressional Black Caucus cited the lack of diversity on the board in a letter sent in January and noted the importance of Black perspectives in building tools that can help mitigate bias in artificial intelligence.
OpenAI’s expanded board of directors is certainly diverse — at least given its background.
In addition to leading the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for six years, Desmond-Hellman served as chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, and previously served as president of product development at Genentech, where he helped develop gene-targeted cancer drugs. Desmond-Hellmann is an oncologist by training and board certified in internal medicine and medical oncology.
Seligman is an attorney and corporate director who gained national attention for representing Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings and President Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial. Seligman served as a venture capitalist and general counsel for Sony before being promoted to CEO of Sony Corporation and president of Sony America.
As for Fidji Simo, before becoming CEO of Instacart, she was the head of Meta’s Facebook app and the vice president responsible for overseeing Meta’s various video, gaming and monetization efforts. Seamus also co-founded the Metrodora Foundation, a health clinic and research organization (and currently serves as its president).
“Sue, Fidji and Nicole have extensive experience leading global organizations and navigating complex regulatory environments, including backgrounds in technology, nonprofits and board governance,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “They will bring Working closely with current board members Adam D’Angelo, Larry Summers and Bret Taylor, as well as Sam and OpenAI’s senior management.”
The law firm WilmerHale hired by OpenAI conducted an investigation and concluded that Altman’s ouster was “the result of a breakdown in relationship and loss of trust” between Altman and the former board of directors, rather than “concerns about product safety, development speed, OpenAI concerns about its financial condition or its statements to investors, customers or business partners.”
OpenAI said in a blog post that during the investigation, WilmerHale conducted dozens of interviews with the company’s former board of directors, current executives, consultants and other witnesses, and reviewed thousands of documents and other company actions. The company believes the former board acted within its rights in terminating Altman, but that Altman’s actions did not amount to termination.
“We unanimously concluded that Sam and [OpenAI president Greg Brockman] is the right leader for OpenAI. “Taylor said in a statement. “We recognize the important role we play in managing transformative technologies for global benefit.”
Not everyone at OpenAI will agree.
A New York Times report earlier this week painted a picture of a controlling Altman — a leader who often told people what they wanted to hear in order to attract them and support his decisions, but when they When they challenge him, he undermines their credibility. According to the Times, Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, and Ilya Sutskever, a former OpenAI board member and chief scientist at the startup, both contacted former OpenAI board members to express concerns about Altman’s behavior before he stepped down last year.
In addition to today’s board appointments, OpenAI said it will adopt a new set of corporate governance guidelines, including strengthening its conflict of interest policy, creating a whistleblower hotline “to serve as an anonymous reporting resource for all OpenAI employees and contractors” and establishing other board committees – including The mission and strategy committee “focuses on the implementation and promotion of OpenAI’s core mission”.
We’ve asked OpenAI for more information about its redesigned conflict of interest policy and mission and strategy committee, and will update this post if we hear back.
