As Sam Altman returns to the CEO post at OpenAI following one of the most high-profile oustings in tech history, the shakeup also sees an all-male board replacing the previous board.
The dramatic events of the past week at OpenAI also briefly saw Mira Murati appointed as interim CEO, putting a woman in charge for mere days before changes again saw the CEO post go briefly to a male outsider.
Now, with Altman back as CEO, three new board members have been announced, including former co-CEO of Salesforce Bret Taylor, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who was part on the previous board.
The only two board members to go this week were the two women, including Australian Helen Toner, who specialises in AI safety.
OpenAI is the parent entity behind ChatGPT, arguably one of the most powerful and best-known AI tools in the world, and Altman has largely become the influential face and spokesperson for AI, which is what made his sudden departure so shocking. Altman has talked up both the benefits and dangers of AI, skillfully moving between the two extremes during interviews. He has called for more regulation on AI, but has also forged quickly ahead on some monumental developments in the space.
While it’s likely there will be more board members appointed to this refreshed board, it’s difficult to ignore its immediate all-male makeup, along with the fact the two formers board members are both female, and were both in favour of removing Altman on Friday. Just one of the previous board members remains — D’Angelo, who was also the previous chair and oversaw the mess of the past week. There are suggestions the previous board was split between “accelerants” of AI — those who want to see it developed and deployed quickly — and “decelerationists”, which include those who believe AI should be more slowly developed and with stronger safety mechanisms in place.
The “decelerationists” in this scenario are now gone from the board. Altman is back at the helm, with the board currently falling strongly into the accellerant camp.
Helen Toner had been on the OpenAI board for two years until this Wednesday. Still in her thirties, she is a University of Melbourne graduate who has made a career studying AI and is the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. When initially appointed to the board, Altman described her as bringing an “understanding of the global AI landscape with an emphasis on safety, which is critical for our efforts and mission.” Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that a paper Toner co-authored with CSET and published in October had been a point of discussion between Altman and Toner, with the paper criticising OpenAI for releasing ChatGPT at the end of 2022 for sparking a predicted tech race of sorts, and leading competitors to “accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes.”
Getting women on the board of OpenAI to support its future will be essential, along with getting more diversity generally involved. And it must happen fast, given how quickly AI is evolving, especially thanks to OpenAI.
There have been strong calls across the tech sector to get women on board, with leading tech journalist Kara Swisher saying the board will grow, “but more women are needed ASAP”. Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, who leads an Open AI competitor, praised the new board but added, “Please, more representation & balance here — powerful white guys are < 0,01% of the world.”
The underrepresentation of women in AI remains a key concern internationally, given rapid advances in AI over the past two years and how quickly the tech is and will continue to disrupt industries and those who work within them. Plenty of examples also show the consequences of bias being embedded in AI, which may have been reduced if there had been more — or at least some — diversity in the teams developing the tech.
Currently, just 12 per cent of AI researchers globally are women, according to stats from the United Nations, while just 20 per cent of employees in technical roles in machine learning companies are female. One area where women do dominate in AI is the ethics space. A lack of women in the technical aspects of AI is no excuse for not including women on tech boards — rather, these stats should see a doubling down of efforts to get women into board and leadership positions so they can better support teams in identifying gaps, while also bolstering opportunities for engaging more diverse representation across all positions.
On Thursday, news emerged from Reuters of a letter from OpenAI staff researchers to their previous board warning about an AI discovery they believed could threaten humanity. The letter was provided days before Altman was fired. Reuters had not seen the letter but reported a spokesperson acknowledging that an internal message had been sent to staffers regarding a project called Q*, with some at OpenAI reportedly believing the project could be a breakthrough in OpenAI’s search for ‘artificial general intelligence’ or AGI, defined by OpenAI as referring to autonomous systems that can surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
Sam Altman shared on X regarding his return that he loves OpenAI and that everything he has done over the past few days has been to keep “the team and its mission together”. He said that with the support of the new three-person (all male) board, as well as support from the the CEO of Microsoft, he is looking forward to returning and to building on their strong partnership with Microsoft.
The mission has consequences for all of us. It must not be concentrated in the hands of Silicon Valley men.