OpenAI Boosts Its Board with Carnegie Mellon Professor: A New Era of AI Innovation

OpenAI has appointed Zico Kolter, a Carnegie Mellon professor and AI safety researcher, to its board of directors, to strengthen the company’s focus on AI safety and robustness.

OpenAI said that Zico Kolter has joined its board of directors. Kolter is a professor who heads Carnegie Mellon’s machine learning department. Most of his research is about making AI safer. The company says on its blog that this makes him an important technical director for OpenAI’s management, according to the company’s blog.

The company’s AI safety has been a big deal. A few months before Kolter’s hiring, some important OpenAI executives and workers responsible for safety, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, left the company.  Sutskever’s old “Superalignment” team, which worked on ways to control “superintelligent” AI systems, reportedly contributed to some of these resignations, according to a source.

The OpenAI board’s Safety and Security Committee, comprising directors Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Paul Nakasone, Nicole Seligman, CEO Sam Altman, and technical experts from OpenAI, will also include Kolter.  Experts aren’t sure how well the committee works because it’s mostly OpenAI employees and makes safety and security decisions for all its projects. We wrote about this in May.

In a statement, Taylor, chairman of the OpenAI board, said, “Zico brings a wealth of technical knowledge and a fresh perspective on AI safety and robustness that will help us make sure that general AI benefits everyone.”

Kolter was the chief data scientist at C3.AI before that. He got his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 2010 and then did a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT from 2010 to 2012. His research includes demonstrating the use of automated optimization techniques to circumvent existing AI protections.

Kolter is currently Bosch’s “chief expert” and AI startup Grey Swan’s chief technical advisor. He has worked with other people in the industry before.