After getting an observer seat on OpenAI’s board for a few months, Microsoft is now leaving that place without voting.
Axios reports that Microsoft told OpenAI in a letter sent on Tuesday that the company is confident in the AI company’s direction because it has seen enough progress.
They told us that there will no longer be any monitors on the board after this change. That likely puts an end to rumors that Apple will get an observer place.
OpenAI told TechCrunch in a statement, “We’re grateful to Microsoft for putting their faith in the Board and the direction of the company. We look forward to continuing our successful partnership.”
“With the help of CFO Sarah Friar, we’re coming up with a new way to talk to and work with investors like Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures and key strategic partners like Microsoft and Apple.”
After Sam Altman was fired and later hired back by OpenAI last year, Microsoft became a watcher. Most of the board was reshuffled, except for Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. Along with D’Aneglo, the new board at OpenAI includes Bret Taylor, who used to co-CEO of Salesforce, Larry Summers, who used to be Treasury Secretary, Fidji Simo, who is CEO of Instacart, Nicole Seligman, who used to be an EVP at Sony Corp, Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, who used to be CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Paul Nakasone, who used to be head of the NSA, and Sam Altman.
The company changed a lot last year, and some of its best workers, like Andrej Karpathy and Ilya Sutskever, have since left. Sutskever started a new AI company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) after he left, and its main goal is to make AI safer.
Microsoft is no longer a watcher, but the company still owns 49% of the for-profit OpenAI after putting almost $13 billion into it. A story from Reuters in April said that antitrust officials in the EU could be against this kind of partnership.
The EU’s executive vice-president for competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, said last month that these kinds of investments shouldn’t be used by big tech companies to control other businesses.
“Over the years, Microsoft has put $13 billion into OpenAI.” “But we need to be careful that these kinds of partnerships don’t turn into a way for one partner to control the other,” she said in a speech.
A partner in the UK company Fladgate named Alex Haffner works in competition. He said that Microsoft is careful not to make regulators look more closely at its investments.
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“It is hard not to think that competition and antitrust authorities have had a big impact on Microsoft’s decision,” Haffner told TechCrunch in an email. “They are looking closely at how Microsoft and other big tech companies affect new AI companies like Open AI.”
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