Vince to chair audit committee; board gains public-market expertise
OpenAI said Tuesday that David Vélez, founder and chief executive of Nubank, a Brazilian digital services firm, and Robin Vince, chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon, will join its board of directors. The appointments expand the board as OpenAI moves toward an initial public offering that could come as soon as later this year. Vince will chair the audit committee, the company said.
The board is chaired by Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce and chief executive of the AI startup Sierra. Other directors include retired U.S. Army General Paul Nakasone and Zico Kolter, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who runs its Machine Learning Department. In an unconventional arrangement dating to OpenAI’s nonprofit roots, the board is controlled by the OpenAI Foundation, a newly formed charity that emerged out of a recent restructuring of the company.
The company has worked to improve its corporate governance after a previous set of directors abruptly fired Chief Executive Sam Altman three years ago for what they described as a lack of candor in his communications. Directors are expected to address several corporate governance issues, including lawsuits that allege the company encouraged suicide and harmful delusions in ChatGPT.
Altman continues to own no equity in the company. Most public-company CEOs are large shareholders and receive stock bonuses tied to performance, moves designed to align financial incentives. Altman, by comparison, has much of his wealth tied up in an array of other startups, a situation that has raised concerns among employees and lawmakers about potential conflicts of interest.
Altman’s dealings recently came under scrutiny from the House Oversight committee and several GOP attorneys who called for a Securities and Exchange Commission review. They cited reporting from April that detailed Altman’s efforts to have OpenAI back companies he personally invested in. Taylor, OpenAI’s board chair, has said that Altman has been transparent in disclosing potential conflicts.
In November, Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, stepped down from OpenAI’s board following the release of emails linking him to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Since his appointment as board chair, Taylor has defended Altman’s leadership, which has come under scrutiny since he was briefly fired in November 2023. Several former OpenAI executives, including former Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, raised concerns about Altman’s management to the former board of directors, contributing to their decision to fire him. Both have since left OpenAI, part of a stream of departures from the company’s executive suite.
“I think Sam’s remarkable. I think he’s a remarkable leader of AI, and I really trust his character,” Taylor said in an interview earlier this year with the tech publication Sources.