Larry Summers Is OpenAI’s Surprise Pick to Mend Fences

Larry Summers Is OpenAI’s Surprise Pick to Mend Fences

Former Treasury secretary, ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor join a three-person initial board appointed as Sam Altman returns as CEO

By Newley Purnell, WSJ

Nov. 22, 2023 8:13 am ET

As Sam Altman looks to steer OpenAI through choppy waters following the turmoil of his ouster and return as chief executive, he will be working with an initial board of directors consisting of two new faces—and one holdover from the previous board that fired him.

The two joiners are seasoned tech veteran Bret Taylor, who was formerly co-CEO of Salesforce and chairman of Twitter, and Larry Summers, the onetime Treasury secretary and Harvard University president whose appointment surprised some observers. Remaining on the board is Adam D’Angelo, a former Facebook executive and the founder of the question-and-answer website Quora, a potential sign that Altman may not have everything his own way after his dramatic reinstatement late Tuesday.

The new directors come after an impasse over who would lead the company that has become synonymous with the boom in artificial-intelligence technology. The confusion over OpenAI’s future and leadership created a dayslong drama that gripped Silicon Valley and the business world.

Since the board unexpectedly fired Altman on Friday, investors have been pushing the directors to reinstate him, employees have threatened to quit en masse and Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest backer, said it was hiring him to lead a new advanced AI research team.

In Larry Summers, OpenAI is tapping one of the world’s most renowned economics minds—and a believer in the power of emerging AI capabilities.

“More and more, I think ChatGPT is coming for the cognitive class,” Summers wrote on X in April, predicting it will change the way doctors, financial traders, authors and editors work. He said those in white-collar professions are likely to see more disruption than those who do manual labor.

Summers served as secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton from 1999-2001 and could be called upon for his expertise on navigating Washington’s political landscape as AI comes under greater scrutiny. He has worked in the world of startups before and is on the board of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s payments company, Block.

U.S. lawmakers witnessing the rise of a powerful new technology with the potential to cause unprecedented harm have been kicking around the idea of forming a federal agency to regulate technology platforms including AI systems.

Taylor, whom OpenAI said will be chairman, joined business-software titan Salesforce in 2016 and served as co-CEO alongside Chairman Marc Benioff until stepping down this year.

Taylor has backed multiple startups and worked with some of the highest-profile leaders in tech, serving as chairman of Twitter for about a year before Elon Musk bought the company.

In February, Taylor said he was launching an AI startup with a longtime veteran of Google to try to ride the next great wave of technological innovation.

“Rarely do you encounter a new technology so powerful that it feels inevitable that it will change the course of every industry,” Taylor said in a post on LinkedIn at the time.

OpenAI said late Tuesday that Sam Altman will return to the artificial-intelligence company as CEO, with a new initial board. WSJ reporter Tom Dotan analyzes the latest developments.

D’Angelo joined OpenAI’s board in 2018. “I continue to think that work toward general AI (with safety in mind) is both important and underappreciated, and I’m happy to contribute to it,” he wrote on X at the time.

He started Quora in 2009 after working for about two years as Facebook’s technology chief, and is now working on his own AI startup, called Poe. The service, which launched publicly in February, describes itself as a platform “designed for seamless conversational experiences, enhanced productivity, and creative content generation.”

Quora in 2017 said it had raised $85 million in Series D funding co-led by Altman and Collaborative Fund, a deal that gave the site a valuation at the time of nearly $1.8 billion.

OpenAi’s announcement on X gave few other details about the board’s direction, saying in its post that the parties were “collaborating to figure out the details.” The board is expected to add as many as six additional members, according to a person familiar with the matter, in addition to continuing its duties.

Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch who had been named as one of two interim chief executives of OpenAI since Friday, said after his appointment he would hire an independent investigator to review the events leading to the upheaval at the company, and would push for governance changes if necessary.

After Altman’s return, Shear said on X that he was deeply pleased and “glad to have been a part of the solution.”