Right after midnight, the Board of OpenAI announced that it had reached an agreement in principle to (1) reinstate Sam Altman as CEO and (2) to appoint new Board members, including:
- Brett Taylor as Chair, who is a former co-CEO of Salesforce;
- Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and former President of Harvard (who then sided with Mark Zuckerberg over the complaint lodged by the Winklevoss twins);
- Adam D’Angelo, the only current member of the Board to remain, who is the founder of Quora;
- Others to be named.
No longer on the Board will be the current directors Tasha McCauley, an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand; Helen Toner, a director at a Washington nonprofit; and OpenAI’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever. Altman and Brockman apparently do not get their Board positions back, either.
This move was expected as nearly 95% of the employees of OpenAI threatened, in a signed open letter, a mutiny to leave for Microsoft’s new unit to be headed by Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman. Given the potential mass quitting, the same Board that had fired Altman was left with no option but to reinstate him.