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Three OpenAI board members stepped down earlier this twelvemonth within month of each other — yet the startup did n’t line up replacement . One of the current phallus , former Facebook CTO and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo , launched an AI chatbot platform , Poe , that leverages — but also competes — with OpenAI products . And two members , Tasha McCauley andHelen Toner , have necktie to the same ideologic philanthropic organization .
Those are a few of the brow - raising takeaways from arecentSubstack post by John Loeber , the co - founding father of digital brokerage company Limit , who dug through the Internet Archive and OpenAI ’s tax filings to get a sense of OpenAI ’s government . His timeline paints a picture of a dining table whose makeup changed often , oftentimes without warning — precipitating today ’s crisis .
betimes in OpenAI ’s account — circa December 2015 — OpenAI ’s plank lie in of two people , conscientious objector - moderate Elon Musk and Sam Altman . By March 2017 , the card had grow to four : Musk , Altman , Chris Clark ( OpenAI ’s first COO ) and Holden Karnofsky , the founder ofeffective altruismresearch and grantmaking introduction Open Philanthropy .
Greg Brockman , ex - OpenAI president , joined the OpenAI dining table in late 2017 alongside Ilya Sutskever , OpenAI ’s master scientist . The circuit board would shrink the subsequent year following Musk ’s removal — reportedly overleadership disagreements — and Clark ’s unannounced departure , but grow afresh in 2018 and 2019 with the additions of D’Angelo , Google robotics project director Sue Yoon ( who ’d leave only a year later ) , LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman , technical school entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Neuralink exec Shivon Zilis .
In 2021 , Republican penis of the House of Representatives Will Hurd and Helen Toner , film director at Georgetown ’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies , joined while Karnofsky reconcile . Karnofsky cited a potential dispute of involvement because his married woman , Daniela Amodei , a former OpenAI employee , help to set up the AI companyAnthropic .
founder that Toner previously worked as a senior inquiry analyst at Open Philanthropy , Loeber speculates that Karnofsky might ’ve endorsed her as his replacement .
This year , Hoffman step down from the OpenAI board to , he said , annul possible conflicts with other investments . Zilis also leave office , as did Hurd — the latter to center on a 2024 U.S. presidential campaign .
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Then there were six : Altman , Brockman , D’Angelo , Toner , McCauley and Sutskever . As of Friday , four remained on the OpenAI board — the previous six minus Altman and Brockman . So what to make of it ?
Loeber indicate that D’Angelo had movement to give up given that Poe arguably compete more like a shot with OpenAI ’s mathematical product and service , including the recently announcedGPT Studio , than even Hoffman ’s investments .
McCauley , meanwhile , is a conscientious objector - beginner of the Center for the Governance of AI ( GovAI ) , which is funded in part by Open Philanthropy — and she along with Toner are member of GovAI ’s advisory board . Besides the fact that Anthropic is in part Open Philanthropy - funded , which has a soupcon of corporate conflict to it , it ’s not out of the enquiry that McCauley and Toner are tight ideologically aligned and thus perhaps not as independently - minded on OpenAI ’s board as it might initially look .
Perhaps in the coming days and week , we ’ll learn how these potential conflicts and interplays contributed to OpenAI ’s undoing — if in fact they did at all .
