Sam Altman (L), US entrepreneur, investor, programmer, and founder and CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, and the company’s co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, speak together at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv on June 5, 2023.
OpenAI’s new board doesn’t appear to be fully built. Negotiations are reportedly underway to install representation from Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, or other major investors.
There’s a notable change in the board’s experience. The previous board included academics and researchers, but OpenAI’s new directors have extensive backgrounds in business and technology.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview with CNBC earlier this week that governance at OpenAI needed to change. Nadella said Wednesday he is “encouraged” by the changes to the company’s board, according to a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance,” he said.
Microsoft, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, and Tiger Global are among the OpenAI investors that lack representation on the board but had been pushing to reinstate Altman, as CNBC previously reported.
Here’s who’s in, who’s out, and what the changes may mean.
Here are the newest members of OpenAI’s board
Bret Taylor, co-CEO of Salesforce, speaks at the Viva Technology Conference in Paris on June 15, 2022.
Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Bret Taylor, board chair
Bret Taylor is currently a board member at the e-commerce platform Shopify. He’s also the former co-CEO of Salesforce and was Twitter’s final board chair prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform.
Taylor co-founded Quip, a collaboration platform that was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. That acquisition propelled him into the seniormost ranks of the enterprise software company, where he would eventually take the co-CEO title in 2021. Taylor left Salesforce in January.
The executive launched his own artificial intelligence venture alongside a former Google executive in February. It isn’t clear if Taylor’s involvement with his own AI startup will cease with his appointment to lead OpenAI’s board.
Taylor did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Larry Summers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Larry Summers
Larry Summers served as Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and was the president of Harvard University. An economist by training, Summers also led the Obama administration’s National Economic Council during the Global Financial Crisis.
His connections in Washington could be valuable for OpenAI as the company faces continued regulatory scrutiny from lawmakers.
Late last year, Summers called OpenAI’s popular generative chatbot ChatGPT a “profound thing for humanity” during an interview with Bloomberg. He compared the advent of the technology to the introduction of the printing press and electricity.
“This could be the most important general-purpose technology since the wheel or fire,” Summers said.
Summers also serves on the board of Block, a financial technology company led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and on the board of Skillsoft, an educational technology company.
Summers stepped down in 2006 from Harvard’s presidency following backlash on campus about comments he made on gender representation in STEM fields at a diversity conference. Summers later apologized for the remarks, saying in a 2005 letter that he was “wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women.”
A representative for Summers declined to comment.
Adam D’Angelo
Adam D’Angelo is the only member of OpenAI’s previous board who still holds a seat. He joined in 2018 and reportedly played a major role in the negotiations that brought Altman back to the helm.
D’Angelo is the CEO of Quora, a platform where users can publicly ask and answer questions. He is also developing an AI chat platform called Poe, which he announced in February. He spent several years at Meta, formerly known as Facebook, and served as CTO from 2006 to 2008.
He has not commented publicly since Altman’s ouster Friday, but he retweeted a post on X that suggested his motives were not “crazy” or “vindictive.” OpenAI’s board fired Altman Friday after determining he was “not consistently candid in his communications,” but its members never elaborated further.
D’Angelo did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Here is who is no longer on OpenAI’s board
Helen Toner, Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at Georgetown’s CSET speaks onstage during Vox Media’s 2023 Code Conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel on September 27, 2023 in Dana Point, California.
Jerod Harris | Getty Images
Helen Toner
Helen Toner is a researcher and director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Toner was a former employee at Open Philanthropy, serving as an advisor on AI policy.
Toner offered what could be seen as public criticism of OpenAI in an October paper, a decision with which Altman reportedly took issue. The paper suggested that OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT undermined the company’s efforts to develop AI safely, by spurring other tech companies into launching their own competing chatbots and forcing them to “accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes.”
She was one of the directors involved in pushing Altman out. She has not responded to CNBC’s previous attempts to contact her.
Director of Business Development for Geosim Tasha McCauley attends the 2014 Kairos Global Summit at Ritz-Carlton Laguna Nigel on October 17, 2014 in Dana Point, California.
Jerod Harris | Getty Images
Tasha McCauley
Tasha McCauley joined OpenAI’s board in 2018. She is an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation, and formerly served as the CEO of GeoSim Systems, which developed an automated city modeling system.
McCauley has not commented publicly since Altman’s firing Friday. She did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Ilya Sutskever, Russian Israeli-Canadian computer scientist and co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI, speaks at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv on June 5, 2023.
Jack Guez | AFP | Getty Images
Ilya Sutskever
Ilya Sutskever co-founded OpenAI and serves as its chief scientist. He also aligned himself, for a time, with the board members who ousted Altman.
Sutskever is the author or co-author of more than 130 research papers on artificial intelligence, neural networks, and generative AI, according to his Google Scholar profile. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto and had a brief post-doctoral stint at Stanford, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Sutskever co-led OpenAI alongside president Greg Brockman, an idea that Altman at the time described as “non-traditional.” Sutskever is close with Brockman and officiated his wedding at OpenAI headquarters in 2019.
Despite his about-face, Sutskever was removed from the board. His status as an OpenAI executive does not appear to have changed.
What’s next?
Sam Altman, chief executive officer (CEO) of OpenAI and inventor of the AI software ChatGPT, joins the Technical University of Munich (TUM) for a panel discussion.
Sven Hoppe | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Semafor reported that Altman had been pushing for months to add more directors at OpenAI, and reports suggest it’s unlikely that OpenAI’s board will remain this small.
Bloomberg said on Thursday that, among the changes Microsoft wanted, was a larger and more experienced board. It’s currently smaller, and we don’t know what, if any, kind of other protections or role on the board Microsoft might get.
The composition of the new board — experienced technology and business executives — suggests that OpenAI may be transforming into a more conventional Silicon Valley startup on paper, not just in spirit.
The new governance, however, does not change the fact that OpenAI remains a “capped-profit” entity owned by a non-profit, with excess profits continuing to flow up to that non-profit.
MongoDB shares sank 16% in extended trading on Wednesday after the database software maker issued disappointing guidance.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $1.28 adjusted vs. 66 cents expected
Revenue: $548.4 million vs. $519.6 million expected
Revenue increased about 20% from a year ago in the quarter that ended on Jan. 31, according to a statement. The company generated $15.8 million in net income, or 19 cents per share, which factors in stock-based compensation. In the same quarter a year ago, MongoDB had registered a net loss of $55.5 million, or 77 cents per share.
MongoDB added 1,900 customers in the quarter, bringing the total to 54,500. But the company ended the quarter with about $360 million in deferred revenue, below the StreetAccount consensus of $370.4 million.
MongoDB is seeing slower growth than it had hoped for in new applications using its Atlas cloud-based database service, Srdjan Tanjga, MongoDB’s interim finance chief, said on a conference call with analysts. Meanwhile, MongoDB is hiring rapidly to pursue more deals with large companies, while pulling back on mid-sized businesses, Tanjga said.
During the quarter, MongoDB acquired artificial intelligence startup Voyage for an undisclosed sum.
“We want to capitalize on a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” CEO Dev Ittycheria said.
For the fiscal first quarter, MongoDB called for 63 cents to 67 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $524 million to $529 million in revenue. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had expected 62 cents of per-share earnings and revenue of $526.8 million.
MongoDB said it expects adjusted earnings per share of $2.44 to $2.62 and revenue of $2.24 billion to $2.28 billion for fiscal 2026. That implies 12.7% revenue growth, which would be the slowest rate at least since the company went public in 2017. Analysts were anticipating $3.34 per share of earnings and $2.32 billion in revenue.
Prior to Wednesday’s after-hours move, MongoDB shares were up 13%, while the S&P 500 was down about 1%.
Content aggregator Digg is making a comeback with the help of an unlikely partner: Reddit co-founder and rival Alexis Ohanian.
Ohanian and Digg founder Kevin Rose acquired the platform for an undisclosed sum. The deal is backed by venture capital firms True Ventures, where Rose is a partner, and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The partnership was announced Wednesday in a video post to the company’s X account in which Rose called the partnership a “team-up he would have never imagined 20 years ago.”
Digg was founded in 2004 and rose to prominence as a major outlet for trending news because it allowed users to rate stories. Rose made what became an infamously goofy appearance on the cover of Businessweek in 2006 as the kid who “made $60 million in 18 months.”
The company said in a release that it aims to differentiate itself in the social media market by “focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a human-centered alternative.” Digg said it will also create a platform that “prioritizes transparency, rewards human effort, and fosters enriching discussions.”
Ohanian also teased the collaboration, telling X followers on Wednesday that he was “working on something new… but also old… but also very new” and is “excited” to be partnering with Rose.
At its peak in 2008, Digg was reportedly valued at about $160 million. But the rise of Facebook and other social sites caused traffic to Digg to plummet. Meanwhile, Reddit, which was founded a year after Digg by Ohanian and current CEO Steve Huffman, emerged as a direct rival to Digg by forming communities around types of content and letting users similarly rate news stories.
In 2012, Digg’s brand and website were acquired by tech incubator Betaworks for about $500,000.
Reddit has continued its ascent, reporting nearly 102 million daily active users at the end of the fourth quarter. The site gained widespread attention when it became the center of the 2020 meme stock craze as retail traders inflicted huge pain on hedge funds shorting stocks using a subreddit known as Wallstreetbets.
Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange last March at $34 a share and has seen its stock nearly quintuple. Shares are up about 1% year to date and added 4% during Wednesday’s session.
Ohanian has moved on to other projects since he stepped down from Reddit’s board in 2020. He’s currently partnering with billionaire Frank McCourt in a bid for TikTok after President Donald Trump extended the initial deadline for the company’s Chinese-parent ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a ban.
Rose said in a post on X that he and Ohanian “dreamed up features that weren’t even possible with yesterday’s tech.”
“The new @digg brings some great nostalgia, but we’re not here to just rebuild the past or clone a competitor,” he wrote.
The cybersecurity software provider said it expects fiscal first-quarter earnings to range between 64 cents and 66 cents per share, versus the average Factset estimate of 95 cents. CrowdStrike is projecting earnings for the year to range between $3.33 and $3.45 per share, excluding items. That fell short $4.42 expected by analysts polled by LSEG.
For the fiscal fourth quarter, CrowdStrike posted a net loss of $92.3 billion, or 37 cents per share, versus net income of $53.7 million, or 22 cents per share, in the year-ago period. The company also reported $21 million in costs from incident-related expenses and $49.9 million of tax expenses connected to acquisitions.
The company also said it anticipates another $73 million in expenses for the first quarter resulting from its July update that spurred a global information technology outage, grounded flights and disrupted businesses. CrowdStrike projects an additional $43 million in costs due to some deal packages offered in its wake.
The outage has also weighed on free cash flow margins, which CrowdStrike said on a conference call with analysts Tuesday it expects to return to 30% or more in fiscal 2027.
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Many on Wall Street expect headwinds from the July issue to start abating in the new fiscal year, with Bernstein’s Peter Weed expecting a pick up in CrowdStrike net retention rate in the new fiscal year.
“Although FY26 guidance marked a conservative start to the year, in our view, we expect management is setting the stage for a return to a beat-and-raise cadence we saw before the outage,” wrote JPMorgan’s Brian Essex.
CrowdStrike’s disappointing guidance offset better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter results. The company posted adjusted earnings of $1.03 per share on $1.06 billion in revenue and said that revenue grew 25% from a year ago.
Founder and CEO George Kurtz called the company a “comeback story” on the conference call.
“I’m extremely proud of the engagement we’ve had with customers, partners, prospects in the market navigating a year that tested CrowdStrike,” he said. “Q4 showcases the fruits of our labors, giving me strong conviction in our AI-native, single platform, excellent execution, and accelerating market opportunity.”