Just months after Microsoft secured an observer seat on OpenAI's board, the company is stepping down from its non-voting seat.
According to Axios, Microsoft said in a letter to OpenAI on Tuesday that the AI company is making sufficient progress and is confident in its direction.
OpenAI said there will no longer be an observer on its board following this change, which likely rules out reports that Apple is taking an observer seat.
“We appreciate Microsoft’s confidence in the board and the direction of the company, and we look forward to a successful partnership going forward,” OpenAI said in a statement to TechCrunch.
“Under the leadership of CFO Sarah Friar, we are pioneering new approaches to informing and engaging key strategic partners like Microsoft and Apple, and investors like Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures.”
Microsoft has taken an observer’s stance since Sam Altman was fired and eventually rehired by OpenAI last year, and most of the board has been reshuffled, except for Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. OpenAI’s new board consists of former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, former Sony Corp EVP Nicole Seligman, former Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former NSA chief Paul Nakasone, and Sam Altman, minus D’Aneglo.
Since OpenAI changed last year, several prominent researchers have left the company, including Andrej Karpathy and Ilya Sutskever. After leaving, Sutskever founded a new AI company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), which focuses on improving AI safety.
Microsoft has stepped down as an observer, but the company still owns 49% of the for-profit OpenAI after investing about $13 billion in it. That kind of partnership could draw the ire of antitrust regulators in the EU, according to a Reuters report in April.
Last month, EU competition policy chief Margrethe Vestager said these types of investments should not be used as a means for big tech companies to control other companies.
“Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI over the years, but we must ensure that partnerships like this do not become a front for one partner to gain dominant influence over another,” she said in her speech.
