The Nonprofit Versus For-Profit OpenAI Powder Keg

It’s been nearly two months since OpenAI’s pared-down board started looking for new directors, and so far, it doesn’t have much to show for it. We have yet to see any actual board appointments, though we’ve gotten plenty of news around candidates being approached. 

The latest one—the CEO of an OpenAI quasi rival—is an interesting example. As Natasha and I reported yesterday, OpenAI board director Adam D’Angelo called Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi last month to see if he might consider joining the nonprofit board. That’s especially surprising because Ghodsi has positioned Databricks as a kind of anti-OpenAI by helping companies develop AI applications using open-source models rather than OpenAI’s closed-source ones.

The Ghodsi ask isn’t the first time D’Angelo has spoken with an OpenAI competitor under unusual circumstances though. I previously reported that the board director and Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei had discussed merging the two startups with Amodei as the CEO of the combined entity during OpenAI’s November leadership crisis.