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.
French satellite group Eutelsat, often seen as Europe’s answer to Elon Musk’s Starlink, saw its share price plummet Wednesday following a report that Japanse investor SoftBank cut its stake in the company.
Shares in Eutelsat were last trading 7.8% lower as of 6:00 a.m. ET.
The moves come following a Reuters report that SoftBank has sold 36 million rights, corresponding to around 26 million shares and around half their stake in the satellite operator.
Eutelsat is the owner of the satellite internet provider OneWeb, which it merged with in 2023 in a bid to challenge Starlink’s dominance in the market.
But the French group has struggled to tap into the U.S. company’s market share. Eutelsat currently has more than 600 satellites in orbit compared to Starlink’s over 6,750, according to the companies’ websites.
After soaring more than 600% in early March this year, as Europe scrambled to bolster its tech sovereignty in the wake of the U.S. cutting military support to Ukraine, Eutelsat shares have since dropped more than 70%.
The company is seen as crucial to Europe’s tech sovereignty ambitions. In June the French state led a 1.35 billion euro ($1.57 billion) investment in Eutelsat, becoming its biggest shareholder with a roughly 30% stake.
Tech sovereignty
In November SoftBank said it had sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia as it looked to free up funds for its investment in OpenAI and other projects.
SoftBank wouldn’t have made the move if it didn’t need to bankroll its next artificial intelligence investments, founder Masayoshi Son said on Monday at an event.
The Japanese giant’s Eutelsat move mirrors its “aggressive monetisation” across its portfolio, Luke Kehoe, analyst at Ookla, told CNBC.
“With governments and strategic European investors, not SoftBank, now funding the recapitalisation, Eutelsat is becoming less a growth story and more a pillar of Europe’s digital sovereignty infrastructure.”
While Starlink is holding on to its scale advantage and is dominant in retail broadband, Eutelsat is carving out a niche in government, aviation, backhaul and emergency connectivity, said Kehoe.
“The open question is whether that higher-value, B2B-centric positioning can deliver attractive returns once the current wave of capex and recapitalisations is behind it, and whether Europe is willing to keep writing cheques at the scale required to narrow the gap with Starlink.”
Eutelsat and SoftBank have been approached for comment.
Apple’s latest iPhone models are shown on display at its Regent Street, London store on the launch day of the iPhone 17.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
Apple will hit a record level of iPhone shipments this year driven by its latest models and a resurgence in its key market of China, research firm IDC has forecast.
The company will ship 247.4 million iPhones in 2025, up just over 6% year-on-year, IDC forecast in a report on Tuesday. That’s more than the 236 million it sold in 2021, when the iPhone 13 was released.
Apple’s predicted surge is “thanks to the phenomenal success of its latest iPhone 17 series,” Nabila Popal, senior research director at IDC, said in a statement, adding that in China, “massive demand for iPhone 17 has significantly accelerated Apple’s performance.”
Shipments are a term used by analysts to refer to the number of devices sent by a vendor to its sales channels like e-commerce partners or stores. They do not directly equate to sales but indicate the demand expected by a company for their products.
When it launched in September, investors saw the iPhone 17 series as a key set of devices for Apple, which was facing increased competition in China and questions about its artificial intelligence strategy, as Android rivals were powering on.
Apple’s shipments are expected to jump 17% year-on-year in China in the fourth quarter, IDC said, leading the research firm to forecast 3% growth in the market this year versus a previous projection of a 1% decline.
IDC’s report follows on from Counterpoint Research last week which forecast Apple to ship more smartphones than Samsung in 2025 for the first time in 14 years.
Bloomberg reported last month that Apple could delay the release of the base model of its next device, the iPhone 18, until 2027, which would break its regular cycle of releasing all of its phones in fall each year. IDC said this could mean Apple’s shipments may drop by 4.2% next year.
Anthropic, the AI startup behind the popular Claude chatbot, is in early talks to launch one of the largest initial public offerings as early as next year, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.
For the potential IPO, Anthropic has engaged law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which has previously worked on high-profile tech IPOs such as Google, LinkedIn and Lyft, the FT said, citing two sources familiar with the matter.
The start-up, led by chief executive Dario Amodei, was also pursuing a private funding round that could value it above $300 billion, including a $15 billion combined commitment from Microsoft and Nvidia, per the report.
It added that Anthropic has also discussed a potential IPO with major investment banks, but that sources characterized the discussions as preliminary and informal.
If true, the news could position Anthropic in a race to market with rival ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which is also reportedly laying the groundwork for a public offering. The potential listings would also test investors’ appetite for loss-making AI startups amid growing fears of a so-called AI bubble.
However, an Anthropic spokesperson told the FT: “It’s fairly standard practice for companies operating at our scale and revenue level to effectively operate as if they are publicly traded companies,” adding that no decisions have been made on timing or whether to go public.
CNBC was unable to reach Anthropic and Wilson Sonsini, which has advised Anthropic for a few years, for comment.
According to one of the FT’s sources, Anthropic has been working through internal preparations for a potential listing, though details were not provided.
CNBC also reported last month that Anthropic was recently valued to the range of $350 billion after receiving investments of up to $5 billion from Microsoft and $10 billion from Nvidia.
According to the FT report, investors in the company are enthusiastic about Anthropic’s potential IPO, which could see it “seize the initiative” from OpenAI.
While OpenAI has been rumoured to be considering an IPO, its chief financial officer recently said the company is not pursuing a near-term listing, even as it closed a $6.6 billion share sale at a $500 billion valuation in October.
