Three women on the new board of directors
In addition to sharing the survey findings, the company announced that it has added three women to its board of directors: Sue Desmond-Hellman, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former general counsel of Sony; and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart.
With these moves, the company wants to demonstrate to investors and customers that it is trying to overcome the internal conflicts that nearly destroyed it last year. Much of the conflict is due to the company’s unusual governance structure: Founded as a nonprofit with the mission of safely building artificial intelligence systems to benefit humanity, it is now a large, rapidly growing, but still controlled company. by a nonprofit board of directors tied to its original mission.
An investigation published Thursday by the New York Times shed light on the situations that led to Altman’s ouster. In the foreground Mira Murati, chief technology officer of OpenAI, who had questioned the management style of the CEO, and also the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, who said he was worried about “manipulative behavior” by Altman.
“I’m glad this whole thing is over,” Altman told reporters.
The board of directors said it will make “improvements” to the company’s governance structure, adopting new corporate governance guidelines, strengthening the company’s policies on conflicts of interest, and creating a whistleblowing hotline.