Source: AFP
CEO Sam Altman will return to OpenAI’s board, the company said Friday, months after a boardroom dust-up saw him fired and rehired by the company behind ChatGPT.
Altman was also found to have been wrongfully fired in an internal investigation that began in the days after his chaotic firing last year, the company said.
Altman will join the board with three other new directors: Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former president of Sony Entertainment. and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart.
They will join former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who joined shortly after the November 2023 shakeup.
Microsoft also won an observer seat on OpenAI’s board at the time, a move that drew criticism and a lawsuit earlier this week from Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the project.
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“I am thrilled to welcome Sue, Nicole and Fidji to the OpenAI Board of Directors,” said Bret Taylor, OpenAI Board Chair.
“Their experience and leadership will ensure that we continue OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” he added.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo is the only incumbent on the old board that made the decision to fire Altman.
Altman became the face of the recent AI boom that burst onto the scene with his decision to launch ChatGPT in November 2022.
But in a shock move, the company’s board summarily sacked Altman without giving a clear reason, sparking the risk of a mass exodus by the company’s 700-strong staff, who stuck by their star CEO.
Microsoft, the tech giant heavily invested in OpenAI, offered to hire those leaving the AI ββcompany, forcing a change of heart from its board, which reinstated Altman after days of chaos.
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The board members behind Altman’s brief ouster stepped down from their roles.
“right leaders”
In the wake of the events, the new board launched an internal investigation into what happened to a law firm.
The results of that survey “unanimously concluded that Altman and President Greg Brockman ‘are the right leaders for OpenAI,'” Taylor said in a glowing statement.
The company said the investigation, which was handled by outside firm WilmerHale, “reviewed more than 30,000 documents; conducted dozens of interviews, including former OpenAI board members, OpenAI executives, former board advisors and other relevant witnesses…”
OpenAI remains the mainstay of genetic artificial intelligence, the technology that can generate human-level text and images in seconds.
However, it faces increased competition from Google, Meta and other startups such as Anthropic, Musk’s xAI and French company Mistral.
OpenAI is now embroiled in a lawsuit with Musk, who accuses Altman and top executives of betraying the company’s original nonprofit status.
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Musk’s lawsuit alleges that OpenAI was now effectively a subsidiary of Microsoft, arguing that this was a breach of contract.
Microsoft’s embrace of artificial intelligence, and in particular its OpenAI technology, has made it the world’s largest company by market capitalization.
OpenAI is also being sued by the New York Times for allegedly illegally using its articles to train the models that power ChatGPT and other applications.
The Times believes ChatGPT has the potential to become a substitute for its journalism and was created by pulling its content from the internet without payment or permission.
Source: AFP