For much of the last year, OpenAI’s board has been criticized as being too small and too divided to effectively govern one of the fastest-growing startups in AI history. Silicon Valley.
On Friday, the board’s dysfunction was exposed to the public when four of its members fired Sam Altman, the popular and powerful CEO of OpenAI. The firing led to a hectic five days, during which Mr. Altman rallied nearly all of the company’s 770 employees to push for the board’s resignation and reinstatement.
Mr. Altman, 38, returned to the company Tuesday evening, after days of haggling over his job and the composition of the board of directors.
Mr. Altman’s board and allies have discussed more than a half-dozen options for his future. They envisioned a board of three to seven members and discussed about 30 candidates, including Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective and widow of Steve Jobs, and Brian Chesky, chief executive of Airbnb. The outgoing board wanted to ensure that replacements would be independent thinkers and experienced enough to stand up to Mr. Altman.
On Tuesday evening, the two sides agreed to create a three-person interim council. It is expected to expand in the coming months, two people familiar with the negotiations said, but the exact figure is unclear. The new group will be tasked with analyzing the structure of OpenAI, chatbot developer ChatGPT, which started as a nonprofit in 2015 but was later transformed into a for-profit subsidiary.
Who is out of the picture?
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Adam D’Angelo: An early Facebook executive and co-founder of the questioning site Quora, Mr. D’Angelo was one of the members of the board of directors that included Mr. Altman. He was the board’s main leader in the negotiations and resisted concessions from Mr. Altman during the tense exchanges, two people familiar with the talks said.
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Brett Taylor: A member of Silicon Valley tech circles and a former executive at Facebook and Salesforce, Mr. Taylor was seen during the negotiations as a neutral party, three people familiar with the discussions said. He is highly regarded among the technorati and is often seen as a sort of mediator in high-pressure situations. Last year, as chairman of Twitter’s board, he was instrumental in negotiating the sale of the platform to Elon Musk for $44 billion.
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Lawrence H. Summers: One of the nation’s most prominent economists, Mr. Summers was a late addition to the list of potential board candidates and has criticized the idea of ending the impasse over how to proceed because he was seen as someone who would stand up to Mr. Altman, two of the people familiar with the talks said. Mr. Summers served as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration and as president of Harvard. He spoke of potential for artificial intelligence to displace workers, but its reputation has been tarnished over the years. While leading Harvard, he said that women might lack intrinsic aptitude for math and science.
Where is the diversity?
Gender and diversity did not play a role in board deliberations, two of the people said. At various points during the negotiations, there were permutations within the board that would have kept either Ms. Toner or Ms. McCauley involved.
One of the people involved in the negotiations said the most important thing was getting a resolution, and that it came with some constraints, including the fact that the candidate pool was largely white and male. The interim board is expected to become more diverse as it grows in the coming months.
