Meet the new OpenAI Board of Directors: Brett Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. Or more precisely the Council at the present time.
At around 1 a.m. ET on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that, after the company’s previous board of directors abruptly fired Sam Altman as CEO last Friday, it had reached an agreement “in principle” for Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO. With a new manager. A “preliminary” list of board members. Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce, will chair that board, along with Quora CEO D’Angelo — who remains from OpenAI’s previous board — and Summers.
The word “initial” indicates that the board is transitional and not permanent. Since this is a plight “in principle,” it is far from concrete. We’ll have to wait for clarification from OpenAI, which should come at a more reasonable hour in the workday.
If edge a report However, it is believed that OpenAI’s eventual board will include nine members – likely including Altman and a Microsoft executive. Microsoft was reportedly considering whether to push for a seat on the board before Tuesday’s hack, which could invite regulatory scrutiny given the company’s relationship with OpenAI. The tech giant clearly feels it’s worth the governance and oversight guarantees.
Now, Taylor’s name has been bandied about in reports over the past few days as a potential appointee to OpenAI’s new board. It is not unlikely that D’Angelo, who is said to have been heavily involved in negotiations to bring Altman back into the OpenAI fold, will have the support needed to retain his seat. But Summers seems a bit strange, at least at first glance.
Summers was an economist who served as United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as Director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. Most recently, he ran the National Economic Council in the White House of then-President Barack Obama, where he played a key role in drawing The Obama Administration’s Response to the Great Recession.
Now, you may be wondering, what is a veteran economist and politician doing on OpenAI’s newly formed board of directors? Well, having a tech outsider on a startup’s board isn’t without precedent, for one. Republican House member Will Hurd once held a seat he vacated in an ill-fated presidential election.
But Summer’s appointment is also strategic, as my colleague Ingrid Lunden pointed out to me via text message. As OpenAI comes under increasing regulatory scrutiny, Summers provides the connections OpenAI will need—and want—with governments, businesses, and academia.
Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI, is one of the biggest losers here. He was reportedly among the board members who pushed for Altman’s removal, and appears to have been forced to give up his significant influence in the company he helped found with Altman nearly eight years ago. If his recent post on X (formerly Twitter) is anything to go by, he deeply regrets it. Anyone will.
Also absent were technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, director of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technologies. If last night’s report is anything to go by, it’s that Altman will be particularly pleased with the latter’s ouster; Altman reportedly tried to remove Toner from the board earlier this year over a paper she co-authored that shed critical light on OpenAI’s safety practices.
As for Brockman, who resigned as OpenAI’s president on Friday in protest of the board’s decision to suspend Altman, it’s unclear what his fate might be. The old board fired Brockman, and OpenAI’s announcement Tuesday said nothing about his return. Stay tuned for more on this front; We keep our ears to the ground.