Larry Summers joins the board of OpenAI as Sam Altman returns
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Larry Summers joins the board of OpenAI as CEO Sam Altman returns just days after he was ousted by the previous board.

The addition of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Summers as well as former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chair and the retention of Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo — suggests a major change in the board.

Larry Summers joins the board of OpenAI as CEO a former president of Harvard University, Summers has experience in politics, corporate boards, and leadership roles in corporate organizations. The software company Skillsoft and Block, which created Cash App, are currently on his board of directors.

As a computer scientist with two degrees from Stanford University, Taylor has a lot of experience working with tech companies. He stepped down from his position as Salesforce’s co-CEO last year. As CEO of Quip, which Salesforce acquired for $750 million in 2016, Taylor founded and led collaboration platform Quip before joining Salesforce. As Facebook’s chief technology officer during its IPO, Taylor also worked there.

D’Angelo, on the other hand, joined OpenAI’s board in 2018 and continues to serve. As a high school student at Phillips Exeter Academy, he developed music suggestion software with Mark Zuckerberg. Having graduated from the California Institute of Technology, he worked at Facebook as chief technology officer before founding Quora in 2009. One of the OpenAI board members voted to oust Altman.

According to Forbes in January, D’Angelo has praised OpenAI’s unorthodox board structure, saying, I hope that we can do a lot more good for the world.

There is a significant difference between those three directors and the previous board, which abruptly terminated Altman late on Friday to wide-ranging repercussions in both the tech and business worlds. A few days later, OpenAI announced it had reached an agreement in principle with Altman.