On November 17, Silicon Valley was plunged into chaos when Sam Altman, CEO of prominent artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, was suddenly ousted by the company's board of directors. After a rollercoaster five days that encapsulated the increasingly heated battle over the future of artificial intelligence, Altman was reinstated and a new board was created. Here's a list of actors from the biggest tech drama of the year:
Sam Altman, CEO and founder of OpenAI: Altman founded OpenAI as a nonprofit lab with Elon Musk and several others in 2015, while serving as president of Y Combinator, a powerful Silicon Valley startup incubator. He took over as CEO in 2018, attached the lab to a for-profit company and soon raised $1 billion in funding from Microsoft.
Greg Brockman, president and founder of OpenAI: After dropping out of the Massachusetts Institute of technology, Brockman was chief technology officer at Stripe, an online payments company that Altman helped incubate. He was one of the 12 founders of OpenAI and said the lab would build ai free of the corporate pressures that drove Google and other tech giants.
Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist and founder of OpenAI: Dr. Sutskever was one of three University of Toronto researchers who fueled the ai boom in 2012 when they published a paper showing that machines could learn to identify objects in images with surprising accuracy. After joining Google, he defected to join Altman, Brockman and others in founding OpenAI.
Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI: Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and later became its chief technology officer. When four members of OpenAI's board of directors (Dr. Sutskever, Adam D'Angelo, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley) decided to remove Altman as CEO, they asked Murati to briefly serve as interim CEO.
Adam D'Angelo, OpenAI board member: As a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, he built an online music player together with Mark Zuckerberg, the future founder of Facebook. After serving as Facebook's chief technology officer from 2006 to 2008, he founded the question-and-answer site Quora. He joined OpenAI's board of directors in 2018 and remains CEO of Quora.
Helen Toner, former OpenAI board member: Ms. Toner joined the board in 2021. She has ties to Effective Altruism, a community of people who believe ai could one day destroy humanity. She is also director of strategy at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging technology, a think tank, where she writes on national security issues. She left the board as part of the deal to bring Mr. Altman back to the company.
Tasha McCauley, former OpenAI board member: Ms McCauley is a senior associate scientist at the RAND Corporation, one of the country's oldest think tanks, and is on the UK board of Effective Ventures, a federation of organizations dedicated to effective altruism. In 2015, she attended a pivotal ai safety summit in Puerto Rico along with Musk and others. She also left the OpenAI board of directors when Altman returned.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft: Nadella ran into Altman in 2018 at the Sun Valley Conference, often called “summer camp for billionaires.” In the following year, Nadella and Microsoft agreed to invest $1 billion in OpenAI. Since then they have invested an additional $12 billion.
Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb: Chesky's company is another tech startup that Altman helped incubate. After Altman was ousted from OpenAI and decided he would find a way to return to the company, Chesky was among the many friends and colleagues who helped make this happen.
Emmett Shear, former CEO of Twitch: Shear founded Justin.tv, another startup that Altman helped incubate. He later served as CEO of Twitch, a spin-off company from Justin.tv. He is among those who believe that ai could one day destroy humanity. Shear also briefly served as interim CEO of OpenAI.
Bret Taylor, new chairman of the OpenAI board of directors: Taylor is the former co-CEO of Salesforce.com and another former CTO of Facebook. He was also president of Twitter when Musk bought it. As part of the agreement to return Mr. Altman to OpenAI, Mr. Taylor joined the OpenAI board and assumed the role of president.
Lawrence H. Summers, new member of the OpenAI board of directors: Summers is one of the country's leading economists. He served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and has been talking about the potential of ai to displace workers. But his reputation has been damaged over the years. While serving as president of Harvard, he said that women might lack an intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science.
Ron Conway, Silicon Valley investor: Conway is a well-known venture capitalist and an old friend of Altman. With Chesky, he helped persuade Altman to return to OpenAI. This week, he sent a text message to Altman urging him to silence speculation about why he was removed from the OpenAI board.