Meet OpenAI's new board members following shakeup, Sam Altman's return
OpenAI has a new board of directors following days of chaos after its previous board abruptly fired Sam Altman as CEO last week, and has added fresh but familiar faces to the panel in its aim to right the ship.
The artificial intelligence startup that developed ChatGPT announced early Wednesday that Altman will return as chief executive, and the new initial board will be comprised of Bret Taylor as chair, Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.
That means three of the directors who participated in Altman's ouster are out. The former members are OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology's Helen Toner.
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D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora, is the only member of the previous board who remains. Here's what to know about the two high-profile additions:
Taylor is the former vice chair and co-CEO of Salesforce, which he departed in January after more than six years at the company. He previously served as chief technology officer at Facebook before it became Meta, and was chairman of Twitter's board of directors before it was dissolved when Elon Musk acquired the platform now known as X.
Early in his career, Taylor co-created Google Maps, and went on to co-found FriendFeed, which was acquired by Facebook. He also founded Quip, which was acquired by Salesforce.
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In February, Taylor announced on LinkedIn that he was launching an AI startup with Google veteran Clay Bavor.
"Rarely do you encounter a new technology so powerful that it feels inevitable that it will change the course of every industry," he wrote in the post. "I remember feeling that way when I first used a web browser in high school, and then again when I first saw Steve Jobs demonstrate the iPhone in 2007. I have that same sense of excitement and inevitability about modern AI, especially given recent advances in large language models."
In addition to his new position as board chair at OpenAI, Taylor serves as a member of the board at Shopify.
Well-known economist Larry Summers served as U.S. Treasury secretary under President Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, and was the president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006.
The Wall Street Journal referred to Summers as a "surprise pick to mend fences" at OpenAI, while noting that he is a "Washington, D.C., whisperer who has said he is a believer in the power of artificial-intelligence capabilities."
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During an interview with Bloomberg TV in April, Summers said ChatGPT has "a great opportunity to level a lot of playing fields" and will disrupt a slew of white-collar jobs.
He posted on X afterward, "More and more, I think ChatGPT is coming for the cognitive class."