Altman’s return to OpenAI is better for Microsoft than an in-house AI lab
OpenAI took fewer than five days. All of which is very, very good for Microsoft Corp. After his shock termination last Friday, Altman returns to a startup with a clearer corporate direction.
OpenAI’s board, previously made up of three staff members and three independent directors with ties to the ‘effective altruism’ movement, and which had a fiduciary duty to humanity rather than investors, will now look much more like a typical tech company board. It’ll have nine seats, at least one of which will likely go to Microsoft. The confirmed board members scream “safe pair of hands" to OpenAI’s investors and customers.
They include Bret Taylor, former co-CEO of Salesforce, and Larry Summers, a former US treasury secretary. The two have served on an array of corporate boards and are well-versed in serving the needs of investors like Microsoft. OpenAI is yet to say what will happen to the three independent board members who voted Altman out.
The New York Times reported that OpenAI’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, academic Helen Toner and robotics entrepreneur Tasha McCauley have all agreed to step down. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who was among the four board members to vote out Altman, appears for now to be staying. As Bloomberg Opinion columnist Matt Levine outlined Tuesday, OpenAI’s efforts to thread the needle between governing a for-profit company and a non-profit organization were convoluted and doomed for its investors.
On top of OpenAI’s structure was a board that answered only to the moral instincts of directors. For some inscrutable reason, they deemed Altman dishonest and thus an impediment to the safety of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or AI systems that might surpass human intelligence. While the setup was
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