OpenAI said Friday that CEO Sam Altman will return to its board of directors.
San Francisco:
OpenAI said Friday that CEO Sam Altman will return to its board of directors, just months after a boardroom feud that resulted in him being fired and rehired by the company behind ChatGPT.
The company said Ultraman was also found to have been wrongfully fired during an internal investigation launched days after his chaotic firing last year.
Altman will join the board along with three other new directors: Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Se Nicole Seligman, former president of Sony Entertainment; and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart.
They will join former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who joined immediately following the turmoil in November 2023.
Microsoft also gained an observer seat on the OpenAI board at the time, a move that drew criticism and lawsuits from Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the project.
“I am delighted to welcome Sue, Nicole and Fidji to the OpenAI Board of Directors,” said Bret Taylor, Chairman of the OpenAI Board of Directors.
“Their experience and leadership will … ensure we achieve OpenAI’s mission of ensuring general artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity,” he added.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo is the only holdover from the old board that made the decision to fire Altman.
Altman decided to release ChatGPT in November 2022, becoming the face of the recent artificial intelligence explosion.
But shockingly, the company’s board of directors immediately fired Altman without giving any clear reason, triggering the threat of mass departures for the company’s 700 outstanding employees who had stuck with the star CEO.
Tech giant Microsoft, which has made a major investment in OpenAI, offered to hire employees who had left the artificial intelligence company, forcing the board to change its mind and reinstate Altman after days of confusion.
Board members who were briefly ousted by Altman are leaving.
-“The Right Leader”-
Following the incident, the newly formed board launched an internal investigation into the incident at a law firm.
Taylor said in a separate statement that the findings “unanimously concluded that Altman and President Gregg Brockman “are the right leaders for OpenAI.”
The company said the investigation, handled by outside firm WilmerHale, “reviewed more than 30,000 documents; conducted dozens of interviews, including with former OpenAI board members, OpenAI executives, former board advisors, and other relevant witnesses…”
OpenAI remains the standard-bearer for generative artificial intelligence, a technology that can generate human-level text and images in seconds.
But it faces increasing competition from Google, Meta and other startups, including Anthropic, Musk’s xAI and French company Mistral.
OpenAI is now locked in a legal battle with Musk, who accuses Altman and executives of betraying the company’s original nonprofit status.
Musk’s lawsuit claims that OpenAI is now effectively a subsidiary of Microsoft, arguing that this breaches the contract.
Microsoft’s embrace of artificial intelligence, especially OpenAI’s technology, has made it the world’s largest company by market capitalization.
OpenAI was also sued by the New York Times for allegedly illegally using its articles to train models that power ChatGPT and other applications.
The Times believes ChatGPT has the ability to become an alternative to its journalism and was built by scraping its content from the internet without payment or permission.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
