The dangers posed by increasingly powerful AI systems have long been a subject of debate among OpenAI’s founders and leaders. But citing the law firm’s findings, Taylor said Altman’s firing “did not arise out of concerns regarding product safety or security.”Nor was it about OpenAI’s finances or any statements made to investors, customers or business partners, Taylor said.Days after his surprise ouster, Altman and his supporters — with backing from most of OpenAI’s workforce and close business partner Microsoft — helped orchestrate a comeback that brought Altman and Brockman back to their executive roles and forced out board members Toner, a Georgetown University researcher; McCauley, a scientist at the RAND Corporation; and another co-founder, Ilya Sutskever. Sutskever kept his job as chief scientist and publicly expressed regret for his role in ousting Altman.”I think Ilya loves OpenAI,” Altman said Friday, saying he hopes they will keep working together but declining to answer a question about Sutskever’s current position at the company.Altman and Brockman did not regain their board seats when they rejoined the company in November. But an “initial” new board of three men was formed, led by Taylor, a former Salesforce and Facebook executive who also chaired Twitter’s board before Elon Musk took over the platform. The others are former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, the only member of the previous board to stay on.(Both Quora and Taylor’s new startup, Sierra, operate their own AI chatbots that rely in part on OpenAI technology.)After it retained the law firm in December, OpenAI said WilmerHale conducted dozens of interviews with the company’s prior board, current executives, advisers and other witnesses. The company also said the law firm reviewed thousands of documents and other corporate actions. WilmerHale didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.The board said it will also be making “improvements” to the company’s governance structure. It said it will adopt new corporate governance guidelines, strengthen the company’s policies around conflicts of interest, create a whistleblower hotline that will allow employees and contractors to submit anonymous reports and establish additional board committees.
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