Open AI informed this morning that the company had “reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.
“We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this,” Open AI adds on their tweet.
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman confirmed they are back at Open AI also via tweet, and Satya Nadella (CEO Microsoft) published the following statement on X: “We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board.
We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.”
“I love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together. when I decided to join Microsoft on Sunday evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. with the new board and with Satya’s support, I’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with Microsoft”.
A believer on AI and an economist with a wide scope to pick a new Board up to 9 members
Adam D’Angelo is the only member of Open AI’s Board that remains. Ilya Sutskever, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley leave.
Bret Tayloris, a veteran in Silicon Valey, who brings with him all the experience acquired at Twitter (now X) and other tech companies where he has undertaken leading positions and responsibilities as a member of the Board.
Former Twitter Chairman replaces Greg Brockman as Chairman of the Board, at least for the moment. Brockman resigned showing his solidarity with Altman, as soon as the CEO of Open AI was fired by the company’s Board.
Taylor is engaged in other AI project with former VP Google Labs, Clay Bavor. They announced the launch of the New Company on Linkedin 10 months ago. On this post he said: “Rarely do you encounter a new technology so powerful that it feels inevitable that it will change the course of every industry. 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.”
Following the information posted on his profile on Linkedin Taylor has left Salesforce, where he was Co-CEO in January this year. He still holds a seat on the Board of Shopify. Shopify is a tech solutions provider that offers an e-commerce platform that lets anyone start, grow, and manage an online shop from €1 per month.
Larry Summers means the incorporation of a far different profile to Open AI’s Board. He brings with him the contacts, influence experience and wide vision acquired during his tenure as 71st Secretary of the Treasury of the united States of America under POTUS Bill Clinton; as Director of the National Economic Council of the United States, dependent on the White House, during the presidency of Barack Obama from January 2009 to December 2010 and as Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1991 to 1993.
Summers as Charles W. Eliot was a professor at Harvard University within the Kennedy School of Government. In 1993 he received the John Bates Clark Medal for his work in the field of economics. He has been President of Harvard from 2001 to 2006 too.
Not a tech expert at all, but with a clear vision on the changes in the future of Mankind to be driven by new technologies such as AI. And Summers shared his vision at Viva Tech Paris last June.
Summers said at Viva Tech:”Since the enlightenment, we have lived in a world that has been defined so much by IQ (intellectual quotient), by cognitive processing, by developing new ideas, by bringing to bear knowledge.
As that becomes more and more a commodity, that can be replicated with data and analysis, we are going to head into a world that is going to be defined much more by EQ (emotional quotient) than IQ and that is going to be a very different place.
It’s a world where a nurse holding a scared patient’s hand is going to be more valuable than a doctor who can process test results & make a diagnosis. It’s going to be a world where a salesperson who can form a relationship is going to be a profound source of value in a business.
It is going to be a world where the products of emotion–the arts–are going to rise relative to the products of the intellect, science.
In many ways it’s going to be a wonderful world but a very different world. It is going to be a world for all us, in universities, in governments and in the private sector, for all of us to shape.”
Words with avision on a tech driven world, but Larry Summers do not show the same open minded approach on the gender equality matter in the tech field.
In fact he had to leave shis responisbilities as President of Harvard University as he was accused of being sexist whe he suggested that the fact that there were few women in mathematics and in the hard sciences it could be due to what he called the unequal distribution of “intrinsic aptitudes”.
Following the information published on The Verge the three members of the new Open AI Board will focus on considering and selecting candidates suitable to become members of a larger Board to be composed by nine people.
Microsoft and other tech companies are said to be looking for a seat in Open AI’s new Board.
