OpenAI has a new board of directors after the ousting and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman over the last week. One of them is former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers who was criticized for saying this January that people would need to lose their jobs in order to stop inflation.
Last Friday, Altman was fired from OpenAI by the board of directors, who said he had not been “consistently candid.” This set off a firestorm at the nonprofit, with cofounder Greg Brockman quitting the same day, and OpenAI investor Microsoft offering Altman and Brockman jobs leading a new AI research team, according to Forbes.
Shortly after that announcement, 91% of the 770 OpenAI employees signed an open letter saying they would quit and join Microsoft’s team unless the board resigned and reinstated Altman. On Wednesday, OpenAI’s board acquiesced, according to CNN. The new board is chaired by ex-CEO of Salesforce Bret Taylor, and includes Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and Summers.
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Summers was the treasury secretary from 1999-2001 under President Bill Clinton. He then led Harvard University until 2006 following a vote of no confidence by the school’s faculty after a clash with Cornel West and a statement that women were underrepresented in STEM in part due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end,” according to The Harvard Crimson. From 2009-2011, he was the director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama.
However, he found controversy when he appeared on Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week this January, saying that “there’s going to need to be increases in unemployment to contain inflation.” While as VICE points out, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said something similar, Summers in particular faced backlash as he delivered his comments while sitting on a tropical beach.
AI was linked to almost 4,000 lost jobs in May, according CBS News. The journalism industry has been hit hard, with some media companies using AI to write articles, despite issues with accuracy and plagiarism.
It’s not just journalism jobs that have been lost. The National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) replaced employees with a chatbot after they voted to unionize. NEDA had to shut it down after it started telling people with eating disorders to starve themselves among other harmful suggestions, according to CBS.
Featured image by Chatham House via Wikimedia Commons.
