Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has a seat at the table – or rather the board – once again.
OpenAI today was announced that Altman will rejoin the company’s board several months after he lost his position and was ousted as CEO of OpenAI.
He is joined by three new members: former Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former Sony Entertainment president Nicole Seligman, and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo — bringing OpenAI’s board to eight people.
Members of the transition board — the board formed after Altman was fired in November — will not be leaving with the appointment of Desmond-Hellman, Seligman and Simo. Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor (current OpenAI board chair), Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, and Harvard economist and former president Larry Summers will remain in their board roles, as did Dee Templeton, a board observer appointed by Microsoft. .
The appointment of the four new board members — and Altman’s reappointment — comes after OpenAI has been criticized for its all-male board composition and the nomination of Summers, who has a history. unflattering remarks about women. The Congressional Black Caucus highlighted the board’s lack of diversity in a letter sent in January, noting the importance of a Black perspective in creating tools to help mitigate AI bias.
OpenAI’s expanded board is certainly different – at least in terms of its background.
Desmond-Hellmann, in addition to heading the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for six years, was previously chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, and before that president of product development at Genentech, where she helped develop cancer drugs. Desmond-Hellmann is a board-certified oncologist in both internal medicine and medical oncology.
Seligman, an attorney and corporate executive, received national attention for representing Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings and President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial. Seligman was Sony’s VC and general counsel before rising to the ranks of CEO of Sony Corporation and president of Sony Corporation of America.
As for Fidji Simo, before becoming CEO of Instacart, she was the head of the Facebook app at Meta and the vice president overseeing Meta’s various video, gaming and monetization efforts. Simo also co-founded — and is currently chairman of — the Metrodora Foundation, a health clinic and research institute.
“Sue, Fidji and Nicole have experience at leading global organizations and navigating complex regulatory environments, including stints in technology, nonprofit and board governance,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “They will work closely with current board members Adam D’Angelo, Larry Summers and Bret Taylor as well as Sam and OpenAI’s senior management.”
The board expansion and Altman’s reinstatement also follows an investigation by OpenAI-retained law firm WilmerHale, which concluded that Altman’s ouster was “a consequence of the breakdown of the relationship and loss of trust” between Altman and the previous board — not out of “concerns about product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI’s finances, or its statement to investors, customers or business partners.”
OpenAI in a suspension said that, during the investigation, WilmerHale conducted dozens of interviews with the company’s former board, current executives, consultants and other witnesses and reviewed thousands of documents and other corporate actions. In the company’s view, the previous board acted within its rights to terminate Altman — but Altman’s conduct did not warrant removal.
“We unanimously concluded that Sam and [OpenAI president Greg Brockman] are the right leaders for OpenAI,” Taylor said in a statement. “We recognize the magnitude of our role in managing transformative technologies for the global good.”
Not everyone would agree on OpenAI.
New York Times reference earlier this week paints a picture of a manipulative Altman — a leader who often told people what they wanted to hear to charm them and support his decisions, but who undermined their credibility when they questioned him. Both OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever, a former OpenAI board member and the startup’s chief scientist, reached out to members of OpenAI’s previous board to raise concerns about Altman’s behavior before his ouster last year , according to The Times.
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, establishing a whistleblower hotline “to serve as an anonymous referral source for all employees and the OpenAI contractors” and additional board committees — including a mission and strategy committee “focused on implementing and advancing OpenAI’s core mission.”
We’ve asked OpenAI for more information about its revised conflict of interest policy and mission and strategy committee, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.
