CEO Sam Altman fires OpenAI Board that sacked him last week

The only remaining member in the OpenAI Board team is CEO of Quora, Adam D'Angelo

Sam Altman on Wednesday returned to OpenAI as the chief executive officer (CEO) and sacked the Board that had fired him last week. However, the only remaining member in the Board team is Adam D'Angelo, CEO of Quora.

Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former US Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard University, Larry Summers will join D'Angelo.

However, neither Altman nor OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who quit as company president following Altman's sacking, will return to the Board, which would soon have six additional members. Following his return as CEO to OpenAI, Altman had posted on X (formerly Twitter), "I love OpenAI, and everything I've done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together."

He further said, "When I decided to join msft on Sunday evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. With the new board and with Satya’s support, I’m looking forward to returning to OpenAI, and building on our strong partnership with msft."

Also Read: Altman's firing and reinstatement; What does it mean for the future of AI?

On November 17, the Board had sacked Altman, and in a statement, said that they sacked him because "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the Board".

Following this, OpenAI's interim CEO Emmett Shear said that he had been assured that "the board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety", without elaborating on why Altman had been sacked.

AI used for commercial gain

According to reports, there have been concerns that OpenAI has been moving quickly away from its mission of "building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity" for commercial gain.

Earlier this month, tech companies and Western governments decided upon a new safety testing regime to allay concerns at the pace at which AI is growing and at the lack of global safeguards in place to control it.

Also Read: Sam Altman is back at OpenAI, but questions remain as to why he was fired

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in London, said that the world was "playing catch-up" in efforts to regulate AI, which had "possible long-term negative consequences on everything, from jobs to culture".