Economist Larry Summers, the former Obama and Clinton official, is joining an initial, revamped OpenAI board, as the company welcomes back CEO Sam Altman just days after he was ousted by the previous board.
The addition of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Summers — as well as former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chair and the retention of Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo — suggests a major change in the board.
Summers brings leadership experience from politics, corporate boards and having served as former president of Harvard University. He currently sits on the board of Block, the company behind Cash App, and the software company Skillsoft.
Taylor has lots of experience with tech companies and has two degrees in computer science from Stanford University. He stepped down from his position as co-CEO of Salesforce last year. Prior to Salesforce, Taylor founded and led collaboration platform Quip, which Salesforce acquired for $750 million in 2016. Taylor also worked as chief technology officer at Facebook during the company’s IPO.
D’Angelo, meanwhile, joined OpenAI’s board in 2018 and remains on it. In high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, he developed music suggestion software along with other students including Mark Zuckerberg. After graduating from the California Institute of Technology, he worked at Facebook as chief technology officer and founded the questions and answers platform Quora in 2009. He was one of the OpenAI board members who voted to oust Altman.
However, D’Angelo has praised OpenAI’s unorthodox board structure (non-profit controlled with a for-profit entity within), telling Forbes in January, “my hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big.”
Those three directors have significantly more experience than much of the previous board, which abruptly fired Altman late on Friday only to see an employee revolt and wide-ranging repercussions in the tech and business worlds. Days later, OpenAI said it had reached an agreement in principle for Altman to return.
The company, which posted the news in the early hours of Tuesday morning, gave few details about what the board structure would ultimately look like, as well as how many members it might eventually include. Nor did the company elaborate on what it meany by calling the three-person board “initial.”
Instead, the organization said it was working on what happens from here.
“We are collaborating to figure out the details,” the company posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Thank you so much for your patience through this.”
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