With the way they fired him and the statement they made, it's hard to see how any of the remaining four could stay on if he did come back... as was previously mentioned, if you shoot at the king, don't miss.
Assuming you don't mean the insiders or the Quora CEO, which aspects of these remaining backgrounds do you find unusual for a Silicon Valley board member?
Tasha McCauley is an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, a job she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously cofounded Fellow Robots, a startup she launched with a colleague from Singularity University, where she’d served as a director of an innovation lab, and then cofounded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology startup where she served as CEO until last year. With her husband Joseph Gorden-Levitt, she was a signer of the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 AI governance principles published in 2017. (Altman, OpenAI cofounder Iyla Sutskever and former board director Elon Musk also signed.)
McCauley currently sits on the advisory board of British-founded international Center for the Governance of AI alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism; McCauley sits on the U.K. board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, its parent organization.
Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in September 2021. Her role: to think about safety in a world where OpenAI’s creation had global influence. “I greatly value Helen’s deep thinking around the long-term risks and effects of AI,” Brockman said in a statement at the time.
More recently, Toner has been making headlines as an expert on China’s AI landscape and the potential role of AI regulation in a geopolitical face-off with the Asian giant. Toner had lived in Beijing in between roles at Open Philanthropy and her current job at CSET, researching its AI ecosystem, per her corporate biography. In June, she co-authored an essay for Foreign Affairs on “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess” that argued — in opposition to Altman’s cited U.S. Senate testimony — that regulation wouldn’t slow down the U.S. in a race between the two nations.
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EDIT TO ADD:
The question wasn't whether this is scintillating substance. The question was, in what way is this unusual in Silicon Valley.
Near as I can tell they never actually launched a product. Their webpage is a GoDaddy parked domain page. Their Facebook page is pictures of them attending conferences and sharing their excitement for what Boston Dynamics and other ACTUAL robotics companies were doing.
>she launched with a colleague from Singularity University
It doesn't appears she's ever had a real job. Someone in the other thread commented that her profile reeks of a three letter agency plant. Possible. Either that or she's just a dabbler funder by her actor husband.
Lol. You literally know nothing about this person other than what you found online. She could be brilliant or offer a perspective the business needs.
Suggesting that some inarguably brilliant technologists and business people would invite a moron to crash their party makes you look petty (at best) and like an idiot (at worst)
Treating the non-profit OpenAI board like the board for a regular for-profit is weird.
This isn't just a non-profit holding company for tax purposes - the whole thing is structured with the intent of giving the non-profit complete control over the for-profit to help achieve the non-profit's charter.
The board being full of typical business people would likely be counterproductive to the goal of staying focused on the non-profit charter vs. general commercial business interests.
I don't know enough about most of the board to have any sort of real judgment about their ability, but there's a lot of comments here that are judging board members based on very different criteria than what they were actually brought in for.
So what? Regardless of launch/no launch, the company was a flop. This is a cheap shot. Just because someone was successful in the past (or not) is not an automatically relevant signal they'll be a great fit when placed in a different domain. Sometimes they have other relevant background and experience, and other times... Maybe they're just connected. What is the level of scrutiny of qualifications in other companies, even public ones? When looking closely at other companies, I've noticed board compositions can vary substantially. As outsiders, we're undoubtedly missing part of the context about what is relevant (to the board) or not.
Suggested reading: Black Swan by Taleb.
p.s. I am not partial to anyone involved, especially clueless board members. I found this comment annoying due to the breathless, baseless, and flawed logic. What was this supposed to add to the conversation?
> So what? Regardless of launch/no launch, the company was a flop.
Nothing wrong with that but a company like Open AI which is literally changing the world does not have a board member who is qualified to be in that position.
Did you find out e.g. Facebook will do the damage that it did and continues to do in social terms?
Have you done anything or has Facebook changed its way based on your ‘findings’?
The choice here is: does capital coupled with runaway egos provide better stewardship of socially impactful technology development or paper pushers or CIA plants?
I agree, but it's a difference believing in a concept vs engaging with persons in that same area. and together with everything else, that just seem to be half political organizations to farm funding from governments or ESG VCs, it doesn't look very good to me
She just sounds like a typical Silicon Valley trend grifter
FTX wasn't a Ponzi scheme per se. SBF committed fraud by saying they had risk controls in place when they had an exemption for his hedge fund: Alameda Research. FTX could be viable if it let Alameda fail.
Alameda played a significant role in propping up the value of FTX through their investment in FTT. Worth questioning how much FTX would have been worth if it hadn't been for various tricks like this.
None of that sounds like actual work or results. It's just a bunch of empty business speak. They are definitely not qualified to serve on the board of a company like OpenAI.
Would Altman's bio be any more impressive if framed the same way? A trash tier startup, failing upwards to a VC, and starting one of the sleziest cryptocurrencies around. Sure sounds like no actual work, qualifications, competence or results.
Their achievements are already framed in their best light.
Hopefully you're able to tell the difference between serving as CEO or president of real reputable companies (the "trash tier startup" still exited for mid-8 figures) versus what looks like being a figure head for fake companies.
He was president of YC, I think it's fair to say people will think he's got a better set of credentials on a YC forum than some omg-ai-is-dangerous-please-fund-me think tank thinker.
Maybe the problem is the meteoric rise of OpenAI--at the time this board was instituted, the company was much smaller, and wouldn't have been able to draw a more illustrious set of board members?
Didnt they have Elon Musk and Jessica Livingston as founding members, their social network would have someone with more credibility to be on the board compared to the current members.
None are out of the ordinary. It’s like Steel Perlot. It’s an indulge-the-wife tchotchke company position. There are lots of these for the wives and girlfriends of successful people.
Just a sinecure and someone you trust for some other reason. But you’ve got to trust them.
Looking at their CVs, they're more qualified than some rando on the internet. So from my point of view, they look more qualified than you, DebtDeflation, rando from the internet.
Adam has competing interests. It's hard to see why he is even allowed in non profit board. And for other two members, their profile seem pretty weak for being in a board of one of most important companies in the world.
