OpenAI finally announced four new board members today and Sam Altman is back on the board!! Perhaps after Elon’s lawsuit, people had their attention back to their governance and this sprang the board back to action. In a different blog post, OpenAI OpenAI also announced that they have concluded the review with regard to Sam Altman’s termination. They are making a few improvements to strengthen their governance including
Adopting a new set of corporate governance guidelines;
Strengthening OpenAI’s Conflict of Interest Policy;
Creating a whistleblower hotline to serve as an anonymous reporting resource for all OpenAI employees and contractors; and
Creating additional Board committees, including a Mission & Strategy committee focused on implementation and advancement of the core mission of OpenAI.
It’s an open secret in silicon valley that Sam Altman has tons of conflict of interest. No conflict no interest they say. I am curious how this new conflict of interest policy will affect Sam Altman’s various business efforts.
The findings from the independent review are also very interesting. It’s basically saying Sam Altman’s behavior was concerning and the prior board’s decision to fire him was not unreasonable. But the board didn’t communicate this decision to the key stakeholders beforehand and didn’t anticipate the termination would destabilize the company. It could have been done but the implementation was too clumsy. The review also said that although Sam Altman’s behavior was concerning, it didn’t really get to the level that warranted a termination. Could they just tell us what Sam Altman did exactly to lose trust of the prior board? From the blog post, it does sound that Sam Altman is not a trustworthy person with high integrity. This is concerning if OpenAI becomes the dominant leader in the AGI race. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen and we have dozens of AI companies out there on-par with OpenAI.
I maintain my opinion that OpenAI’s peculiar structure is going to come back to haunt them as they become more successful. I don’t understand the point of this structure. If they want to share profits with the public, there are many different ways. Their current priority based profit sharing system plus non-profit governance is just odd and people with skin in the game such as employees and investors don’t have any power unless they quit en masse again in the next coup. I hope they fix this ASAP.