After Sam Altman Rejoins, Who Are ChatGPT Maker OpenAI’s New Board Members

Altman had returned as CEO of OpenAI just four days after his firing.

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 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. She also sits on the board of Shopify.

She spent a decade at social media giant Meta Platforms, 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 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 the biotechnology firm Genentech.

Nicole Seligman

The lawyer is a board member at Paramount Global, MeiraGTx and Intuitive Machines. 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 practice 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.