Factbox: Who are OpenAI's new board members?

MeiraGTx Holdings

11/03/2024 14:42

March 11 (Reuters) - Sam Altman is rejoining the board
of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI along with three new directors, as the
startup tries to move past his sudden ouster in November that
had shocked the tech industry.
    Altman had returned as CEO of OpenAI just four days after
his firing with a new board made up of Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo,
former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former co-CEO
of Salesforce Bret Taylor.    
    The board will now expand with the addition of Sue
Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, Nicole Seligman, former president of Sony
Entertainment, and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.  
    Here are more details about the new members:
        
  
        FIDJI SIMO
  
        Simo serves as chief executive and chair of Instacart
 CART.O . She also sits on the board of Shopify  SHOP.TO .
    She spent a decade at social media giant Meta Platforms
 META.O , including as the head of Facebook from 2019 until
2021. 
    She also serves as president of the Metrodora Foundation.
Simo is a co-founder of the Metrodora Institute, a
multidisciplinary medical clinic and research foundation, which
she co-founded. 
            
  
        SUE DESMOND-HELLMAN
  
        A former board member of Meta, Desmond-Hellman was the
CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from 2014-20. She
is also a former director of Proctor and Gamble's board and
currently serves on the board of U.S. drugmaker Pfizer  PFE.N 
and the President's Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology.  
    She was professor and chancellor of the University of
California, San Francisco from 2009 to 2014, the first woman to
hold the position. She has also served as president of product
development at biotechnology firm Genentech. 
        
  
        NICOLE SELIGMAN
  
    The lawyer is a board member at Paramount Global  PARA.O ,
MeiraGTx  MGTX.O  and Intuitive Machines  LUNR.O . She also
served on the board of Viacom through 2019, when it merged with
CBS to form Paramount, then called ViacomCBS. 
    She has held several leadership positions at Japanese
company Sony including president of Sony Entertainment from
2014-16 and president of Sony's America business. 
    She was a partner in litigation practise at American law
firm Williams & Connolly LLP. She also served as a law clerk to
Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court of the United
States.
   

 (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh and Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru;
Editing by Anil D'Silva)
 ((Jaspreet.Singh@thomsonreuters.com; https://twitter.com/i_jass;))