DINT 124 - One tech CEO gets praised, another gets abandoned. The difference? Gender
Who comes out on top when a CEO makes a tough decision? In the case of Sam Altman and Susan Wojcicki, the male CEO gets support and the female CEO gets abandoned by her entire board of directors.
Last week, Susan Wojcicki’s entire board of directors resigned as she announced her plans to take biotech company 23andMe private. Three days later the board bounced. Four days after that Wojcicki’s sister died, delaying the board’s threatened action to hire a consultant to restructure her plans.
Conversely, Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, also announced plans to remove the company’s nonprofit status and go all-in as a for-profit firm just two days ago. These plans include raising billions of dollars to aid in the company’s growth in the new for-profit direction.
That same day, chief technology officer Mira Murati and two other founding members of the OpenAI leadership team resigned.
While Wojcicki’s role as CEO of the company she founded seems tenuous based on reports in the tech media, Altman still enjoys support from his board of directors. This support may come at the expense of OpenAI’s largest source of funds, Microsoft. Microsoft could justify its funding of OpenAI as a nonprofit. But once it turns for-profit, Microsoft faces
You may remember Murati and Altman from the dramatic end to 2023 with Murati spearheading a group challenging Altman’s leadership. Here’s a quick rundown in five acts:
Events below took place between November 17 and November 22, 2023:
Pre-Nov. 17 - Dropping dimes on Sam. Murati and others within OpenAI pen a letter to board members about Altman’s leadership style.
Nov. 17 - The board of OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman.
Nov. 19 - Mira Murati took over as interim CEO, making her the first female CEO of a top AI firm.
![[Breaking News] First female CEO of top AI firm, Mira Murati, ousted in just 2 days amidst OpenAI Shakespearean drama and intrigue](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5992c595-1863-4536-9059-0b3f210ed3a5_1080x1080.png)
Nov. 22 - The board reinstated Altman as CEO and returned Murati to her original role as CTO.
Nov. 22 - Board shakeup. Two female board members stepped down, as did Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and innovator at OpenAI.
All has been fairly quiet on the OpenAI front since these dramatic events, or so it seemed.
The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported on the drama quietly brewing in OpenAI that led to Murati’s resignation.
Altman has been making efforts to convert OpenAI to a for-profit company and now it’s becoming a reality. Soon, OpenAI will look much like its competitors, Anthropic, which was founded by a former OpenAI engineer who disagreed with the direction of the company, and xAI, Elon Musk’s answer to OpenAI.
Since Mira Murati was involved in the group that led to Sam Altman’s ouster last November, wouldn’t she have been one of the first out the door? Clearly not, as Reuters reports Murati handles much of the day-to-day operations of OpenAI. That is, until her resignation announcement two days ago. Now Murati will focus on “a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership” according to Sam Altman’s note to OpenAI staffers, which he also posted on X.com.
It’s important to note this new generation of leadership won’t include a woman. In Altman’s note, he mentioned several names who would be filling the spaces vacated by Murati, Barret Zoph, and Bob McGrew.
OpenAI’s future looks much like that of its AI peers xAI and Anthropic, predominantly male.
With Wojcicki, it appears she doesn’t enjoy the same latitude to take big swings, engage risks, and inspire others to follow her lead as Sam Altman does. One wonders if there’s any room in tech for women to make tough decisions, lead with integrity, and still be able to grieve personal losses.
Altman’s restructuring of OpenAI could net him a substantial part of the company’s projected value of $150 billion once the years-long restructuring is all said and done.
Wojcicki on the other hand, once led 23andMe to the lofty realm of a $6 billion valuation just after its initial public offering in 2021.Today, the company is valued at 99.9% less than $6 billion. This could present an opportunity to buy back the stock at an advantageous price, implement changes and watch the valuation soar once again. With the proper support, that is.
Altman enjoyed vocal support of customers and employees who vowed to depart OpenAI if he was no longer CEO. In the midst of Wojcicki’s crisis, news coverage is the only reaction to the mass departure of her company’s board of directors and the death of her sister, two events that happened within days of each other.
Let’s keep watching Wojcicki to see if she comes out on the other side of these challenging times.
Related Coverage:
One woman who is in a position of leadership at OpenAI is Anna Makanju, VP of global affairs.
Tuesday Makanju touted OpenAI’s bias correcting abilities at the United Nations Summit of the Future. OpenAI’s product o1 serves as a corrective tool seeking to even out less-than-favorable responses to prompts.
TechCrunch found that the new anti-bias large language model didn’t tend toward implied bias. But o1 does say the quiet part out loud and leans more towards explicit bias than its counterpart GPT-4o.
According to OpenAI’s research paper introducing testing results of o1, the model’s purpose is to create “state-of-the-art performance on certain benchmarks for risks such as generating illicit advice, choosing stereotyped responses, and succumbing to known jailbreaks.”
By its own admission, OpenAI needs to stress test OpenAI o1-preview and OpenAI o1-mini (the official names of the o1 model series) and alignment with risk management protocols. That’s a very scientific way of saying, ‘we’re not quite ready yet but it’s coming.’
It’s good to see Makanju have such a visible role. Here’s to hoping she is also the face of the o1 model series’ success should it ever reach the system’s lofty goals of lessening “potential risks that stem from heightened intelligence.”
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