However, without voting rights
Microsoft gets a seat on the OpenAI board of directors
November 30, 2023, 6:37 p.m
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The software giant Microsoft invested $1 billion in the AI startup OpenAI in 2019. In the meantime, investment commitments have not only increased many times over. After the drama surrounding Sam Altman, the company also sent a member to the board of directors of the ChatGPT inventor.
The software giant Microsoft receives a seat on the board of directors of ChatGPT developer OpenAI – but without voting rights. The software company, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, will appoint a member with observer status to the management and supervisory board of the startup company specializing in artificial intelligence, OpenAI announced.
Three members of the board of directors have already been appointed. They are Silicon Valley veteran Bret Taylor as chairman, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the head of the question-and-answer website Quora, Adam D’Angelo. The news comes after turbulent days for the developer of the chatbot ChatGPT, which was released exactly a year ago – on November 30, 2022.
The previous board of directors fired OpenAI boss Sam Altman completely unexpectedly on November 17th. Just four days later, the company made a U-turn and announced the return of the 38-year-old, who has become a face of artificial intelligence (AI) through ChatGPT. In between, Microsoft announced that it would hire Altman to head a new AI research team. In addition, the majority of OpenAI employees had threatened to follow Altman to Microsoft if the board of directors responsible for the dismissal did not resign.
Microsoft and OpenAI are closely linked: The software giant initially invested one billion dollars (910 million euros) in the startup company founded in 2015 in 2019. According to media reports, investment commitments have now grown to around $13 billion. Microsoft has already integrated ChatGPT into its products, such as the Bing search engine.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit company, but changed its structure four years later in order to be able to generate limited profits. The dispute over the past few weeks is said to have revolved around the question of whether the focus in the development of artificial intelligence should be on potential profits or on responsible use of the new technology.