“Sam Altman Returns As CEO, OpenAI Has a New Initial Board: Mira Murati As CTO, Greg Brockman Returns As President. Read Messages from CEO Sam Altman and Board Chair Bret Taylor”, 2023-11-29 (; backlinks):
Below are messages CEO Sam Altman and board chair Bret Taylor shared with the company this afternoon.
[Altman Twitter commentary: “The way we plan to deal with this [problem of conflicts of interest] is with full disclosure and leaving decisions about how to manage situations like these up to the Board.” (cf. Reid Hoffman), “The best interests of the company and the mission always come first.”]
“The best interests of the company and the mission always come first.” Glorious choice of order
Message from Sam to the company
I am returning to OpenAI as CEO. Mira will return to her role as CTO. The new initial board will consist of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.
I have never been more excited about the future. I am extremely grateful for everyone’s hard work in an unclear and unprecedented situation, and I believe our resilience and spirit set us apart in the industry. I feel so, so good about our probability of success for achieving our mission.
Before getting to what comes next, I’d like to share some thanks.
I love and respect Ilya, I think he’s a guiding light of the field and a gem of a human being. I harbor zero ill will towards him. While Ilya will no longer serve on the board, we hope to continue our working relationship and are discussing how he can continue his work at OpenAI.
I am grateful to Adam, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner for working with us to come to this solution that best serves the mission. I’m excited to continue to work with Adam and am sincerely thankful to Helen and Tasha for investing a huge amount of effort in this process.
Thank you also to Emmett Shear who had a key and constructive role in helping us reach this outcome. Emmett’s dedication to AI safety and balancing stakeholders’ interests was clear.
…The leadership team—Mira, Brad, Jason, Che, Hannah, Diane, Anna, Bob, Srinivas, Matt, Lilian, Miles, Jan, Wojciech, John, Jonathan, Pat, and many more—is clearly ready to run the company without me. They say one way to evaluate a CEO is how you pick and train your potential successors; on that metric I am doing far better than I realized. It’s clear to me that the company is in great hands, and I hope this is abundantly clear to everyone. Thank you all.
[Then why was his leaving such a big deal…?]
…Satya Nadella, Kevin, Amy, and Brad have been incredible partners throughout this, with exactly the right priorities all the way through. They’ve had our backs and were ready to welcome all of us if we couldn’t achieve our primary goal. We clearly made the right choice to partner with Microsoft and I’m excited that our new board will include them as a non-voting observer. Thank you.
…Message from Bret to the company
…As a Board, we are focused on strengthening OpenAI’s corporate governance. Here’s how we plan to do it:
We will build a qualified, diverse Board of exceptional individuals whose collective experience represents the breadth of OpenAI’s mission—from technology to safety to policy. We are pleased that this Board will include a non-voting observer for Microsoft.
We will further stabilize the OpenAI organization so that we can continue to serve our mission. This will include convening an independent committee of the Board to oversee a review of the recent events.
We will enhance the governance structure of OpenAI so that all stakeholders—users, customers, employees, partners, and community members—can trust that OpenAI will continue to thrive.