Are board members working full-time on being board members at OpenAI? If so, I would expect that they could take actions to alleviate their lack of technical expertises by spending 15h/week to get up to speed on the technical side, reading papers and maybe learning to train LMs themselves. It naively seems like AI is sufficiently shallow that 15h/week is enough to get most of the expertise you need within a year.
They almost certainly are not. In none of the OA Form 990s up to ~2022 or so are board members listed as working more than an hour or two per week (as board members—obviously board members who were working for the OA corporation, like Sutskever/Altman/Brockman, presumably are working fulltime there). For example in the 2022 Form 990, Zillis and Hurd etc list 3 hours per week. (And from descriptions of the board’s activity in 2022, this is probably fictional: I have no idea how they supposedly all spent >156 hours on OA in 2022...) This is also standard for non-profits; offhand, I can’t think of any non-profits where non-employee board members work 40 hours a week as board members.
So it would be quite a change if any non-employee board members were working fulltime now. And in Nakasone’s case, he appears to have plenty on his plate already:
On May 8th, 2024, Nakasone was named Founding Director of Vanderbilt University’s new Institute for National Defense and Global Security. Nakasone will also hold a Research Professorship within Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering, as well as serving as special advisor to the chancellor.[36] In addition, on May 10th, 2024, Nakasone was elected to the board of trustees of Saint John’s University, his alma mater.[37]
That’s true for for-profit boards too—to pick a random example, here’s the Microsoft Board, pretty much everybody seems to have a super intense day job and/or to serve on 4+ company boards simultaneously.
Are board members working full-time on being board members at OpenAI? If so, I would expect that they could take actions to alleviate their lack of technical expertises by spending 15h/week to get up to speed on the technical side, reading papers and maybe learning to train LMs themselves. It naively seems like AI is sufficiently shallow that 15h/week is enough to get most of the expertise you need within a year.
They almost certainly are not. In none of the OA Form 990s up to ~2022 or so are board members listed as working more than an hour or two per week (as board members—obviously board members who were working for the OA corporation, like Sutskever/Altman/Brockman, presumably are working fulltime there). For example in the 2022 Form 990, Zillis and Hurd etc list 3 hours per week. (And from descriptions of the board’s activity in 2022, this is probably fictional: I have no idea how they supposedly all spent >156 hours on OA in 2022...) This is also standard for non-profits; offhand, I can’t think of any non-profits where non-employee board members work 40 hours a week as board members.
So it would be quite a change if any non-employee board members were working fulltime now. And in Nakasone’s case, he appears to have plenty on his plate already:
That’s true for for-profit boards too—to pick a random example, here’s the Microsoft Board, pretty much everybody seems to have a super intense day job and/or to serve on 4+ company boards simultaneously.