Sam Altman: CEO for OpenAI and CEO for a non-profit, despite the challenge’s experience with physics and nonprofits
Even though he was the CEO, Sam Altman insisted that he wasn’t the most important person. Even though he had been meeting world leaders in the past,Altman still felt that he needed to keep up with what was going on in San Francisco.
When I asked how the company ran in his absence, he told me that they had a great team that can do a lot of things. “But some things only a CEO can do—some HR thing of the moment, or you have to kill some project, or something with a major partner.” He would accumulate those items and bat out responses at the end of the day. He went back and forth between speechifying, meeting developers, and taking tea with the prime ministers.
One of the sources says some investors had previously feared OpenAI’s remaining independent directors—with little background in corporate governance—could end up failing in their oversight duties. Less thought was given to the possibility of aggressive action like that taken against Altman. “I never expected them to be activists,” the person says.
An attempt to restore Altman as CEO and replace the board ran into difficulty Sunday over the role of existing directors in choosing their replacements, Bloomberg reported.
The 11-page bylaws OpenAI Inc. established in January 2016 give board members the exclusive right to elect and remove fellow directors and also to determine the board’s size. A majority of the board can take action without prior notice, as long as the majority gives written consent, according to the rules.
Nathan Benaitch, general partner of Air Street Capital and a co-author of the “State ofAI Report,” says that Openai’s corporate structure is at odds with the need to support cutting-edge research through huge amounts of equity investment. He says that it appears that physics won out during the experiment, because it was an experiment to defy the corporate physics.
Sam Altman told Vanity Fair he didn’t have much experience with nonprofits. He said that he wasn’t sure how it would go.
