SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 06: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco, California.
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The board of directors of the nonprofit organization that oversees AI company OpenAI shocked the tech world on Friday by firing CEO Sam Altman and removing Chairman Greg Brockman from the board. Brockman resigned hours later.
This move was even more surprising given the unusual nature of OpenAI’s corporate structure: according to OpenAI’s own report description of its corporate structure, directors hold no ownership interest in OpenAI or other compensation; Altman himself only held shares indirectly through a “small” investment made by Y Combinator, of which he was previously president.
According to OpenAI’s corporate governance, directors’ primary fiduciary duty is not to maintain shareholder value, but to uphold the company’s mission to create safe AGI, or artificial general intelligence, “which is largely beneficial.” Profits, the company said, were secondary to that mission. OpenAI began publishing the names of its board of directors on its website in July, following the departures of Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis and Will Hurd earlier this year, according to an archived version of the site on the Wayback Machine.
An AI-focused venture capitalist noted that after Hoffman’s departure, OpenAI’s nonprofit board lacked traditional governance. “These are not the business or operational leaders you would want running the world’s largest privately held company,” they said.
Here’s who made the decision to fire Altman and remove Brockman from its board. Update: Altman didn’t get a vote, Information has reported. Brockman job an account of his version of events at X which indicated that the board of directors had also acted without his knowledge.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Adam D’AngeloCEO of answer site Quora, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in April 2018. At the time, he wrote: “I continue to think that the work towards general AI (with security in mind) is both important and underappreciated.” In an interview with Forbes In January, D’Angelo argued that one of OpenAI’s strengths was its capped-profit business structure and nonprofit control. “There will be no results if this organization is one of the big five tech companies,” D’Angelo said. “It’s something fundamentally different, and I hope we can do a lot more good in the world than just becoming another company that big.”
Tasha McCauley is a deputy executive scientist at RAND Corporation, a position she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously co-founded Fellow Robots, a startup she launched with a colleague at Singularity University, where she was director of an innovation lab, and then co-founded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology startup where she was CEO until last year. With her husband Joseph Gorden-Levitt, she was a signatory of the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 AI governance principles published in 2017. (Altman, OpenAI co-founder Iyla Sutskever and former board director Elon Musk also signed. )
McCauley currently serves on the advisory board of the UK-founded International Center for AI Governance, alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And it is linked to the Effective Altruism movement through the Center for Effective Altruism; McCauley sits on the UK board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, its parent organisation.
Ilya Sutskever is now OpenAI’s only co-founder on its oversight board. He joined the company after earning a doctorate in computer science at the University of Toronto, co-founded a project called DNNResearch shortly after, and then served as a research scientist at Google until the end of 2015. He was the first research director of OpenAI and became chief scientist. in 2018. Sutskever co-authored a key paper on neural networks with legendary AI scholar Geoffrey Hinton in 2012 and helped lead the AlphaGo project, which used artificial intelligence to conquer ancient and complex board game, a key milestone in modern AI research. history.
In July, OpenAI announced that Suskever was co-leading a team that would take 20% of OpenAI’s compute and focus it on “superalignment,” helping develop technology solutions for how to oversee AI if it ever becomes smarter than humans. Sutskever’s most recent post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, was on October 6, when he wrote: “If you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you will [sic] have a bad time.
Helene Toner, director of strategy and basic research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined the OpenAI board of directors in September 2021. Her role: thinking about security in a world where OpenAI’s creation had a global influence. “I greatly appreciate Helen’s thoughtful consideration of the risks and long-term effects of AI,” Brockman said in a statement. statement at the time.
More recently, Toner has made headlines as an expert on China’s AI landscape and the potential role of AI regulation in a geopolitical showdown with the Asian giant. Toner had lived in Beijing between her roles at Open Philanthropy and her current job at CSET, where she was researching its AI ecosystem, according to her company biography. In June, she co-wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs on “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess” that argued—contrary to Altman’s cited testimony in the U.S. Senate—that regulation would not slow down U.S. United in a race between the two nations.
Former board directors (who were not involved in Altman’s firing)
Reid Hoffmann was an early investor in OpenAI, but the former LinkedIn co-founder and billionaire invested through his charitable foundation, not through his venture capital firm Greylock. (The first VC to check out OpenAI was Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, a strong supporter of OpenAI but not a board director.) A long-time advocate of OpenAI although he has invested in a number of new AI startups, Hoffman announced in a LinkedIn. job in March, he left his board of directors to avoid possible conflicts of interest. The decision included “months of conversations with Sam, Greylock colleagues and friends,” he wrote. “I remain an ally of OpenAI and available for anything I can do to help the organization and its mission of AI beneficial to humanity,” he added.
Will hurt, a former Texas Congressman, joined the OpenAI Board of Directors in May 2021 to provide public policy expertise. “He has a deep understanding of both artificial intelligence and public policy, both of which are critical to the future success of AI,” Altman said. wrote SO. But Hurd resigned in July, the month after announcing a presidential campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination. In October, he abandoned of this race too.
Holden Karnofsky, director of AI strategy at Open Philanthropy, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in 2017 following the nonprofit’s recommendation to award a $30 million grant to the company. AI over three years. At the time, Karnofsky was the executive director of Open Philanthropy (he briefly took a position leave of absence in early 2023 and has since returned to lead its AI risk initiatives). Karnofsky is married to Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei, who was an executive at OpenAI when Open Philanthropy announced its grantmaking decision. In a relationship disclosure, he noted that “OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano are both technical advisors to Open Philanthropy and live in the same house as Holden. Additionally, Holden is engaged to Dario’s sister Daniela. Karnofsky resigned from the OpenAI board of directors in 2021 when Amodei left the company to create Anthropic.
Elon Muskwho runs X, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and The Boring Company, co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and resigned from its board in 2018 after pledged $1 billion in financing. Company filings showed that only $15 million definitely came from Musk, TechCrunch reported. Musk has claims that he is “the reason OpenAI exists” and has openly criticized the company in the past. He left the board of directors quoting a conflict of interest with Tesla.
Shivon Zilis is director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company. Zilis joined OpenAI as an advisor in 2016 and as a board member in 2020, but would have left his position following Musk’s comments criticizing the company. (Zilis and Musk are the parents of twins, Strider and Azure.) “I still don’t understand how a nonprofit I donated about $100 million to somehow became on the other a market capitalization of $30 billion for profit. If it’s legal, why isn’t everyone doing it? Musk tweeted. Zilis currently serves on the board of directors of Shield AI.
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