"We're so back": OpenAI shareholders breathe a sigh of relief after company regains its footing

Happy holidays, all. See you back here Monday.:) (Psst, don't forget to sign up for our San Francisco event, coming in late January. Tell us where we should head next.)

Sam Altman is back at OpenAI as CEO, according to a company tweet. The company said it is still working out the details but that a new board will include former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and board member and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, who reportedly remains on to give the previous board some representation. No explicit mention was made of whether OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever or OpenAI board members Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner will stay on the board, but the odds aren't good. As for Altman and OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman, the rumor is they will give up their board seats, and Altman will agree to an investigation into his behavior as CEO. All that said, Altman's return occasioned quite the celebration at OpenAI HQ: a smoke machine employed by revelers triggered a fire alarm and a subsequent visit by two truckloads of San Francisco's Bravest. "We are so back," Brockman tweeted.

*I separately appeared on CNBC today and talked in part about a lingering question that has yet to be answered: whether OpenAI's "capped profit" model, instituted by OpenAI in 2019 soon after Altman became its CEO, will remain in place. The idea was to give investors up to 100 times their return before giving away excess profit to the rest of the world, because as Altman told me in 2019, if OpenAI is successful in its mission, it could “maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe, and that’s for sure not okay for one group of investors to have.” 

With so much shifting around right now, it's worth watching to see if the structure sticks. Surely, investors, said to be again planning to buy $1 billion in secondary shares of OpenAI at an astronomical valuation (reportedly $86 billion), would be very happy to see OpenAI dispense with it!

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