PSA: My first sentence below is calling out a recognition of general board composition as announced, not how poorly this episode has been handled. A deeper and more important conversation is to be had around the skillsets, representation, and requirements needed to ensure the leading company in AI has the appropriate oversight & representation, particularly given the broad societal impacts. This has obviously been discussed and is being discussed at length as to general oversight of AI writ large, but it is front and center in terms of OpenAI's board composition and is an opportunity to put in place a governance structure & composition that incentivizes and oversees healthy economic returns (capitalism) that are also combined with healthy societies (democracies). Additionally, there are generally zero requirements today for anyone to serve on a board and we have seen the consequences of inappropriate, inexperienced, unqualified and simply poorly managed boards play out from the likes of Theranos, Uber, WeWork, etc. Along with this, we see m(is)aligned incentives for which boards are often optimizing that have enormous consequences. NET: don't over-simplify my sentence below.
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On OpenAI‘s new board: so 2 women got fired and 2 white men got hired…for a company that supposedly is having one of the broadest impacts across society.
NOTE: I have no insider knowledge and this entire episode has been poorly handled at best (and Arvind Rajan summarizes it well here: https://lnkd.in/gG9-Xjvg). But the topic of board representation, oversight, requirements, and needs is an important discussion amidst the real world harms we already see playing out with AI today. And one that I would encourage Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway to hammer on.
Luann Abrams Celine Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA Sue Gordon
Matthew Davie
EVP, Chief Business Officer @ FIS Platform | Co-Founder & CEO @ Bond | xCOO Twilio, Mapbox, SAP SuccessFactors | Goldman Sachs IBD alum
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