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.”