Sam Altman rejoins OpenAI board, company adds three new members

OpenAI announced on Friday its new board and the conclusion of an internal investigation by US law firm WilmerHale into the events that led to the ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Sam Altman will also rejoin the OpenAI board.

The new board members are:

• Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellman, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who is also on the Pfizer Board of Directors and on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
• Nicole Seligman, former executive vice president and global general counsel of Sony and president of Sony Entertainment, who also serves on the board of directors of Paramount Global, Meira GTx and Intuitive Machines, Inc.
• Fiji Simo, CEO and Chairman of Instacart, who is also on Shopify’s board of directors.

The three new members will “work closely with current board members Adam D’Angelo, Larry Summers and Brett Taylor, as well as Greg, Sam and OpenAI’s senior management,” according to a release.

OpenAI will continue to expand the board going forward, according to a Zoom call with reporters.

OpenAI did not publish the investigation report, but provided a summary of the findings.

“The review concluded that there was a significant breakdown of trust between the previous board and Sam and Greg,” Taylor said, adding that the review also “concluded that the board acted in good faith… [and] I didn’t foresee some of the volatility that followed.”

Taylor also said that the board’s concerns did not arise over product safety and security concerns, OpenAI’s finances or statements to customers or business partners, that it was “simply a breakdown in trust between the board and Mr. Altman.” .

The WilmerHale investigation began in December, and lawyers filed their report today, which includes dozens of interviews with former OpenAI board members and advisers, current executives and other witnesses. The investigation also included a review of more than 30,000 documents, according to a release.

“We unanimously concluded that Sam and Greg are the right leaders for OpenAI,” said Brett Taylor, chairman of the OpenAI board, in a release.

“I’m very grateful to Brett, Larry and WilmerHale,” Altman said in a call with reporters on Zoom. He added, speaking of CTO Mira Murati, “Mira in particular contributes to OpenAI all the time … but during this period in November, she did an amazing job helping to lead the company.”

He added that he was “excited to move forward here” and that the situation was “closed”. He also mentioned that he wished he had acted differently regarding the differences of opinion with the board.

In November, OpenAI’s board ousted Altman, prompting resignations — or threats of resignations — including an open letter signed by nearly all OpenAI employees and an uproar from investors including Microsoft. Within a week, Altman was back at the company, and board members Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley and Ilya Sutkever, who had voted to remove Altman, left. Adam D’Angelo, who had also voted to remove Altman, remained on the board.

When Altman was asked about Sutskever’s condition on the Zoom call with reporters, he said he had no updates to share.

“I love Ilya … I hope we work together for the rest of my career, my career, whatever it is,” Altman said. “Nothing to announce today.”

OpenAI has since announced new board members, including former Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Microsoft received a non-voting observer position on the board.

After ChatGPT launched in November 2022, it broke records at the time as the fastest growing consumer app in history and now has around 100 million weekly active users, along with more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies using the platform , according to OpenAI. Last year, Microsoft invested an additional $10 billion in the company, making it the biggest AI investment of the year, according to PitchBook, and OpenAI reportedly made a deal which will allow employees to sell $86 billion worth of stock, although the deal reportedly took longer than expected due to the events surrounding Altman’s ouster.

A few roller coaster weeks at the company still reverberate months later.

This month, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk sued OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty, court documents revealed Thursday.

In their complaint, Musk and his lawyers claim that ChatGPT’s creator “has transformed itself into a de facto closed-source subsidiary of the world’s largest technology company: Microsoft.” They also claim that this arrangement conflicts with a 2015 memorandum of understanding and certificate of incorporation that OpenAI established with Musk, who was a major donor to a co-founder of OpenAI in its early years.

As part of Microsoft’s contract with OpenAI, the tech giant only has rights to OpenAI’s “pre-AGI” technology, and it’s up to OpenAI’s board to determine whether the company has reached that stage. Musk argued in his filing that after OpenAI’s board reshuffle in November — when Toner, McCauley and Sutskever were removed — the new board is “ill-equipped” to determine independently whether OpenAI has reached AGI and therefore whether its technology is outside the scope of the deal for exclusivity with Microsoft.

Lawyers told CNBC they have doubts about the legal viability of Musk’s case, and OpenAI said it plans to file a motion to dismiss all of Musk’s claims.

In response to the high-profile lawsuit, OpenAI reproduced old emails from Musk in which the Tesla and SpaceX CEO encouraged the growing startup to raise at least $1 billion in funding and agreed that it should “start being less open.” over time and “does not share” the company’s science with the public.

Musk’s lawsuit also follows some controversy over Altman’s previous chip ventures and investments.

Just before Altman’s brief suspension, he was allegedly seeking billions for a new and not-yet-formed chip venture codenamed “Tigris” to eventually compete with Nvidia, traveling to the Middle East to raise money from investors.

In 2018, Altman personally invested in an AI chip startup called Rain Neuromorphics, based near OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco, and in 2019, OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51 million on Rain’s chips. In December, the US forced a Saudi Aramco-backed venture capital firm to sell its stake in Rain.