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On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the buzzy AI company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT, suddenly and publicly ousted its CEO Sam Altman. The announcement came one day after he appeared publicly on behalf of his company at Thursday’s APEC CEO Summit.

OpenAI’s board said it conducted “a deliberative review process” and that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the board’s statement continued.

As of this week, OpenAI’s six-person board included OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman, who was also chairman of the board; Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist; Adam D’Angelo; Tasha McCauley; Helen Toner; and Altman himself. The company began publicly posting its board’s member list on its website in July, after the departures of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, director of Neuralink Shivon Zilis and former Texas congressman Will Hurd.

Here’s a rundown of the board behind the controversial shake-up:

Greg Brockman: An OpenAI co-founder, Brockman quit his role at the company on Friday in protest of Altman’s ousting, saying publicly, “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today.” Brockman spent five years as CTO of Stripe before moving on to help launch OpenAI. In 2020, Brockman said OpenAI’s top obstacle in its first five years was the idea that making the full extent of the startup’s work public wasn’t necessarily beneficial for humanity, in his eyes. At the time, he said, “We realized that as these things get powerful, they’re dual-use…and that we as technology developers have a responsibility to not just say, ‘Hey, we built this thing, it’s up to the world to decide how to use it.'”

Ilya Sutskever: As of now, Sutskever is the sole remaining OpenAI co-founder on the board. After co-founding DNNResearch — an AI startup focused on neural networks — and selling it to Google, Sutskever joined Google as a research scientist and stayed for nearly three years before moving on to OpenAI as a co-founder and research director. Since November 2018, he’s been the company’s chief scientist.

Adam D’Angelo: The current CEO of Quora, a social platform for questions and answers, D’Angelo spent nearly four years at Facebook and was CTO of the tech giant from 2006 to 2008. He is not an employee at OpenAI.

Tasha McCauley: McCauley, who is not an OpenAI employee, is on the board of directors of both OpenAI and GeoSim Systems, a geospatial tech company. She is an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation and has been on the OpenAI board since 2018.

Helen Toner: Toner is a board member and non-OpenAI employee who spent time at the University of Oxford’s Center for the Governance of AI, and has been a director of strategy for Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology for nearly five years. Last year, Toner told the Journal of Political Risk that, “Building AI systems that are safe, reliable, fair, and interpretable is an enormous open problem… Organizations building and deploying AI will also have to recognize that beating their competitors to market— or to the battlefield — is to no avail if the systems they’re fielding are buggy, hackable, or unpredictable.”

Earlier this year, Microsoft’s expanded investment in OpenAI — an additional $10 billion — made it the biggest AI investment of the year, according to PitchBook. In April, the startup reportedly closed a $300 million share sale at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion, with investments from firms such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Despite its significant investment, however, Microsoft has no board seat at OpenAI.

“While our partnership with Microsoft includes a multibillion-dollar investment, OpenAI remains an entirely independent company governed by the OpenAI Nonprofit,” OpenAI has publicly stated. “Microsoft has no board seat and no control. And… AGI is explicitly carved out of all commercial and IP licensing agreements. These arrangements exemplify why we chose Microsoft as our compute and commercial partner.”

Microsoft had no new comments to add on Saturday and requests for comments from board members weren’t immediately returned to CNBC.

OpenAI’s product feature announcements earlier this month showed that one of the hottest companies in tech has been rapidly evolving its offerings in an effort to stay ahead of rivals like Anthropic, Google and Meta in the AI arms race.

ChatGPT, which broke records as the fastest-growing consumer app in history months after its launch, now has about 100 million weekly active users, OpenAI said this month. More than 92% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform, up from 80% in August, and they span across industries like financial services, legal applications and education, according to Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO-turned-interim CEO.

The news of Altman’s ousting comes after OpenAI’s Dev Day, the company’s first in-person event, on Nov. 6, which also included a surprise appearance by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

“The systems that are needed as you aggressively push forward on your road map require us to be on the top of our game, and we intend fully to commit ourselves fully to making sure you all… have not only the best systems for training and inference, but also the most compute,” Nadella told Altman while onstage together at Dev Day. He added, “That’s the way we’re going to make progress.”

On that day, Altman told Nadella, “I think we have the best partnership in tech and I’m excited for us to build AGI together.”

As recently as last month, OpenAI was reportedly in talks to close a deal that would lead to an $80 billion valuation. When CNBC asked OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap about that deal, he declined to comment.

At OpenAI’s Dev Day, in response to a CNBC question about GPT-5, Altman said, “We want to do it, but we don’t have a timeline.”

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Okta pops more than 20% on strong earnings and guidance beat

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Okta pops more than 20% on strong earnings and guidance beat

Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta Inc., smiles during a Bloomberg Technology television interview in San Francisco on April 4, 2022.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Okta shares soared 22% on Tuesday after the cloud-based identity management company delivered strong fourth-quarter earnings and beat estimates on guidance.

The move put the stock on pace for its best day in more than a year.

Okta posted adjusted earnings late Monday of 78 cents per share, while revenue increased 13% from a year earlier to $682 million. That beat the average analyst estimates of 73 cents per share in earnings and $669.6 million in revenue, according to LSEG.

First-quarter revenue should come in between $678 million and $680 million, which also topped estimates.

On the company’s earnings call, CEO Todd McKinnon called it a “blowout quarter” as bookings topped $1 billion in a single period for the first time.

“We’re excited about the momentum we’ve built going into FY 2026 and are taking the right steps to advance our position as the leader in the identity market,” McKinnon said. “More and more customers are looking to consolidate their disparate and ineffective identity systems, and Okta is there to meet them with the most comprehensive identity security platform in the market today,” McKinnon added.

Okta allows companies to manage employee access or devices by providing tools such as single sign-on and multifactor authentication. Shares have rallied about 35% this year, including Tuesday’s pop, after slumping 13% in 2024. In late 2023, Okta suffered a high-profile data breach that gave access to client files through a support system.

Some Wall Street firms turned more positive on the stock after the latest results, with both D.A. Davidson and Mizuho upgrading their ratings. D.A. Davidson called the likelihood of double-digit growth “durable” as the company shows signs of stabilization.

Mizuho’s Gregg Moskowitz said the firm “underestimated” the upside to committed remaining performance obligations, or subscription backlog that the company expects to recognize as revenue over the next year.

“More broadly, OKTA continues to be a clear leader in the critically important identity management market,” Moskowitz wrote. “And we now have a higher confidence level that OKTA will increasingly benefit from its group of newer products that have already begun to drive a meaningful contribution.”

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Okta CEO Todd McKinnon goes one-on-one with Jim Cramer

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‘Music to our ears’: Qualcomm CEO welcomes TSMC’s $100 billion investment to boost U.S. chipmaking

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'Music to our ears': Qualcomm CEO welcomes TSMC's 0 billion investment to boost U.S. chipmaking

We're at the beginning of a 'significant upgrade' for AI smartphones, Qualcomm CEO says

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.‘s $100 billion commitment to expand manufacturing in the U.S. is “great news,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC on Tuesday, adding it helps with diversification of chipmaking locations.

Amon also addressed U.S President Donald Trump’s tariff policy, suggesting longer term technology trends would outweigh any short term uncertainty.

Trump announced on Monday that TSMC would invest $100 billion in the U.S. which would go toward building more chip fabrication plants in Arizona. TSMC is the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer and supplies chips to the likes of Qualcomm, Apple and Nvidia.

The U.S., under leadership of both Trump and former President Joe Biden, has sought to bring more cutting-edge chip manufacturing to American soil on the grounds that it is a matter of national and economic security to have these advanced technologies made closer to home.

Many in the technology industry have backed these plans, including Qualcomm.

“Look, this is great news,” Amon said. “It shows that semiconductors are important. It’s going to be important for … the economy. Economic security means access to semiconductors. More manufacturing is music to our ears.”

Amon said that some of Qualcomm’s chips are already manufactured in TSMC’s existing plants in Arizona and in the future, the company will get more semiconductors made in the U.S.

“TSMC is a great supplier of manufacturing for Qualcomm. They have a facility in Arizona. We already have chips built in Arizona. The more capacity that they put we’re going to use it, same way we’ve been using in Taiwan, we’re going to use it in other locations,” Amon said.

Global companies are also digesting the imposition of tariffs by the U.S. on Mexico and Canada as well as additional duties on China.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon speaks at the Computex forum in Taipei, Taiwan, June 3, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Amon said it’s currently difficult to predict the impact on Qualcomm from the tariffs.

“It’s hard to tell because you don’t know exactly how this is going to go. The interesting thing is we’re big
exporters of chips. We’re not an importer of chips … Chips are going to devices. They’re made all over the world, and it’s hard to really know what is happening,” Amon said.

“We’re just is going to navigate based on whatever the outcome is.”

The Qualcomm CEO said there are a number of key technology trends that are likely to support the U.S. giant’s business in the long term, over the short term tariff uncertainty.

We are right at the “beginning of a significant upgrade for AI smartphones. We’re seeing PCs changing to AI PCs. Cars are becoming computers. That’s what’s driving our business, not necessarily what we’re going to see in the short term,” Amon said.

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Samsung to launch its Apple Vision Pro rival headset this year

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Samsung to launch its Apple Vision Pro rival headset this year

Samsung’s extended reality ‘Project Moohan’ headset on display at the Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona.

Arjun Kharpal | CNBC

Samsung will launch its extended reality headset this year, a spokesperson for the company told CNBC on Tuesday.

The device, dubbed Project Moohan, is Samsung’s answer to Apple‘s $3,500 Vision Pro, which was launched last year.

Samsung teased the headset last year and put it on display at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Samsung refers to the product as “extended reality” or XR device which aims to merge the digital and physical world. However, there are currently few details about the device. Four cameras are visible in the front lens of the physical headset and there appears to be touch controls on the side.

Samsung worked alongside both Qualcomm and Google to develop a new kind of operating system for these kind of devices, known as the Android XR platform.

In December, Samsung said Google Gemini would be installed in the headset allowing wearers to experience a “conversation user interface.”

This would presumably enable users to interact with Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, to help navigate through apps and tasks. The cameras also suggest there will be some sort of gesture control similar to Apple’s Vision Pro.

“To me, the breakthrough technology is a combination of advanced vision capability with intelligence that understands user intention. I think without the intelligence part, it’s a defective product,” Patrick Chomet, executive vice president at Samsung’s mobile division, told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday.

Chomet hinted at a world envisioned by many consumer electronics firms, where smarter AI digital assistants are able to more intuitively understand user requirements on a device.

Samsung was one of the early players in virtual reality headsets, a market that never really took off the way many companies had predicted. But with technology advancing in areas from displays to chips, mixed or extended reality has been touted by big players as a new frontier in computing.

Samsung teased a future product roadmap during a January presentation when it launched its flagship S25 series of smartphones. One slide of the presentation showed outlines of future devices including a trifold smartphone, similar to Huawei’s Mate XT, as well as the Project Moohan headset.

The final product was a pair of glasses, which could hint at a different type of future XR headset. Smart glasses offer similar experiences to a headset but without wearing a bulky device.

Companies including Meta, Snap and XReal have been developing so-called augmented reality glasses. AR is when digital images are overlaid on the real world in front of you.

CNBC reported last year that Samsung, Qualcomm and Google were collaborating on a mixed-reality set of glasses. Samsung appeared to confirm such a collaboration at the S25 event in January.

Chomet did not give a timeline for the launch of a glasses product. However, he said that it is likely people will use multiple devices.

“Probably for quite some time still the smartphone will be the most used device,” Chomet said. “I see a world where people have various things including in their home, in their car. And the device will help you accomplish what you need to accomplish.”

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