OpenAI: The return of the king
He’s back! After an epic five-day-long mishegoss, Sam Altman has been re-instated as OpenAI CEO.
The company has also changed its board of directors, removing three of the four board members involved in firing Altman. Among the new directors are Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce; Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary; and Adam D’Angelo, the only member of OpenAI’s previous board to remain. Taylor will be the chairman, the company said. Altman won’t be on the initial board.
Dig deeper: Salesforce tries to grab AI talent from the OpenAI maelstrom
The departing board members are Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and co-founder; Tasha McCauley, an adjunct senior management scientist at the Rand Corp., a policy nonprofit; and Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a research organization tied to Georgetown University. Also, anonymous sources told the WSJ that the board may expand in the near future.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who nearly got to purloin all of OpenAI’s employees, said he was encouraged things are sort of back to the status quo ante bellum.
Why we care. If you’re a ChatGPT user, you probably feel better about the future of the company and tool than you did when the entire company was threatening to resign.
Remaining questions:
- How does the new board prioritize profit, R&D and AI safety/bias and other social concerns around the technology?
- Why did former/current OpenAI president decide yesterday (when he wasn’t technically employed by the company) was a good time to announce that ChatGPT with voice is now available to all free users?
- Does Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff’s offer to hire any disaffected OpenAI employees at their current pay still stand? If so, how much more is he willing to offer?
- Speaking of pay, how much did former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear get paid for three days of being OpenAI’s interim CEO?
To quote OG martech genius William Shakespeare, “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
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About the author
Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.
