OpenAI Co-Founder & CEO Sam Altman speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 at Moscone Convention Center (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Sam Altman, the pioneer in artificial intelligence and entrepreneur is back at the helm of OpenAI, the company he founded, after an interregnum, along with three new board members of his choosing. An internal investigation into the circumstances of his ouster and return last fall was also completed. But Altman will now have to deal with the headache of several lawsuits brought against OpenAI in recent months.
The three new board members are Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who is also on the Board of Directors at Pfizer and on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Nicole Seligman, former EVP and Global General Counsel of Sony and President of Sony Entertainment, who is also on the Board of Directors at Paramount Global, and Fidji Simo, CEO and Chair of Instacart, who is also on the Board of Directors at Shopify.
OpenAI’s Chairman of the Board Bret Taylor said “The review concluded there was a significant breakdown of trust between the prior board and Sam and Greg [Brockman OpenAI co-founder].”
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Taylor added the investigation determined that in last year’s termination of Sam Altman, “the board acted in good faith… [and] did not anticipate some of the instability that led afterwards.”
“We have unanimously concluded that Sam and Greg are the right leaders for OpenAI,” Bret Taylor, said.
“We have important work in front of us, and we can’t wait to show you what’s next,” Sam Altman tweeted.
In another Tweet, Sam Altman described the last few months as a “challenging time” for OpenAI.
In what was one of the strangest business stories of 2023, Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, only to return just a few days later. At the time, it was reported that Altman’s ouster was spurred by fears that he was not concerned with the dangers involved in the expansion of AI tech.
Sam Altman said that he, “learned a lot” from the experience.
“When I believed a former board member was harming OpenAI,” he said, “through some of their actions, I should have handled that situation with more grace and care. I apologize for this, and I wish I had done it differently. I assume a genuine belief in the crucial importance of getting AGI right from everyone involved.”
Now Sam Altman and OpenAI will need to handle all of the lawsuits accusing the firm of copyright infringement, as well as a major one brought by one of its co-founders Elon Musk. Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman’s OPenAI for breach of contract charging that the company has failed to live up to its found principle of working, “for the benefit of humanity broadly.” Sam Altman is also named in the lawsuit that alleges he reneged on the original plan for OpenAI to be a non-profit, open-source mission.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research and implementation organization based in the United States. It was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and several others. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all humanity.
Sam Altman has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine and one of the “Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology” by Businessweek. He is also the founder of the Long Term Future Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in companies working to solve long-term problems like climate change and pandemics.
