On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the buzzy AI company behind the widely-used chatbot ChatGPT, unexpectedly and publicly removed its CEO Sam Altman from his position. This announcement came one day after he had presented on behalf of the company at the APEC CEO Summit. The board declared that it had gone through "a deliberative review process" and that Altman had not been forthright in his dealing with the board, stopping it from being able to carry out its responsibilities properly. It went on to specify that "the board no longer has faith in his capacity to keep leading OpenAI."
As of this week, OpenAI's board of directors was composed of six individuals, including OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman, who was also the chairperson of the board; Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever; Adam D'Angelo; Tasha McCauley; Helen Toner; and Altman. The business began publicly listing its board members in July, after the departures of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Neuralink director Shivon Zilis and former Texas congressman Will Hurd. This is what's known about the board involved in the contentious shake-up:
Greg Brockman: An OpenAI co-founder, Brockman stepped down from his role at the company on Friday after Altman's removal, saying in public, "Sam and I are flabbergasted and devastated by what the board did today." Prior to joining forces with OpenAI, Brockman was CTO of Stripe for five years. In 2020, Brockman expressed that OpenAI's biggest challenge in the first five years was the idea that revealing the full range of the startup's work wasn't necessarily in the best interest of humanity, in his opinion. At the time, he commented, "We realized that as these things get powerful, they're dual-use...and that we as technology developers have a duty to not just say, 'Hey, we built this thing, it's up to the world to decide how to use it.'"
Ilya Sutskever: As of now, Sutskever is the only staying OpenAI co-founder on the board. After co-founding DNNResearch -- an AI startup focused on neural networks -- and selling it to Google, Sutskever worked as a research scientist at the tech giant for nearly three years before moving on to OpenAI as a co-founder and research director. For almost two years, he has been the company's Chief Scientist.
Adam D'Angelo: The present CEO of Quora, a social platform for questions and answers, D'Angelo spent almost four years at Facebook and was CTO of the tech giant from 2006 to 2008. He is not an employee at OpenAI.
Tasha McCauley: McCauley, who is not an OpenAI employee, is a part of the boards of both OpenAI and GeoSim Systems, a geospatial tech company. She is a part-time senior management scientist at Rand Corporation and has been on the OpenAI board since 2018.
Helen Toner: Toner is a board member and non-OpenAI employee who spent time at the University of Oxford's Center for the Governance of AI, and has been a strategy director for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology for almost five years. Last year, Toner told the Journal of Political Risk that, "Developing AI systems that are secure, dependable, equitable, and understandable is a colossal open problem... Organisations building and deploying AI will also need to accept that beating their competitors to market — or to the battlefield — is pointless if the systems they're fielding are flawed, hackable, or unpredictable."
Earlier this year, Microsoft's amplified investment in OpenAI — an additional $10 billion — made it the largest AI investment of the year, according to PitchBook. In April, the startup is said to have completed a $300 million share sale at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion, with investments from firms such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Regardless of its hefty investment, remarkably Microsoft has no board seat at OpenAI. OpenAI has publicly noted that, "While our partnership with Microsoft includes a multibillion-dollar investment, OpenAI remains a wholly independent company governed by the OpenAI Nonprofit. Microsoft has no board seat and no control. And... AGI is clearly distinct from all commercial and IP licensing agreements. These agreements demonstrate why we chose Microsoft as our compute and commercial partner."
Microsoft could not provide any additional comments on Saturday and requests for statements from board members were not responded to immediately by CNBC.
OpenAI's product feature announcements earlier this month showed that one of the most sought-after companies in tech has been quickly maturing its offerings in an attempt to stay ahead of rivals like Anthropic, Google and Meta in the AI race.
ChatGPT, which holds the record as the fastest-growing consumer app ever after its launch, now has around 100 million weekly active users, OpenAI announced this month. Over 92% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform, up from 80% in August, and they span across industries like financial services, legal applications and education, as per Mira Murati, OpenAI's CTO-turned-Interim CEO.
This news of Altman's ousting comes after OpenAI's Dev Day, the company's first in-person event, on Nov. 6, which also featured a surprise appearance by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
"The systems that are needed as you aggressively push forward on your roadmap necessitate us to be at the top of our game, and we intend to commit ourselves fully to ensuring you all... have not only the most effective systems for training and inference, but also the most processing power," Nadella told Altman while onstage together at Dev Day. He added, "That's the way we're going to make progress."
On that day, Altman replied, "I think we have the best partnership in tech and I'm ecstatic for us to build AGI together."
As recently as last month, OpenAI was purportedly in talks to seal a deal that would lead to an $80 billion valuation. When CNBC questioned OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap about that deal, he declined to comment.
At OpenAI's Dev Day, in response to a CNBC inquiry about GPT-5, Altman said, "We want to do it, but we don't have a timeline."
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