🤔So, Sam Altman picked his board🤔
let's spiral
💖Motivation Meows💖
Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of The Black Cat.
I am selfishly going to start by promoting the investigation I have been working on for TechCrunch. For the past few weeks, I have been looking at Techstars, one of the largest accelerator programs in the world. It’s undergoing a myriad of changes, with all the drama that comes along with money, power, and ego. If you want to keep up with my investigation, here are two parts: “Techstars’ $80M partnership with J.P. Morgan is on the rocks, employees say” and “Leaked documents show Techstars lost $7 million in 2023 but still had plenty of cash.”
This month, I’m reading: Germinal by Emile Zola
This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: Escapism by Raye
💢From the Chatterbox💢
So, OpenAI picked its board, and, not surprisingly, Sam Altman is back on it.
On Friday, it was announced that the third-party investigation that was done after his ousting in November cleared. The report found that OpenAI’s board was within its rights to oust Sam but also said that whatever Sam did, his actions did not constitute his removal. Sam immediately returned to the board, alongside the appointment of three women: Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, the former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former executive vice president and general counsel of Sony; and Fidgi Simo, the CEO of Instacart. They join Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, former co-CEO and current OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who once said that the lack of women in STEM is because men and women were born with different mathematical abilities.
Sam’s return to the board means he is once again the boss and the boss of the boss. Though I’m not sure the company's structure has changed (it gives the non-profit control over the for-profit enterprise), the company has made changes to improve its governance structure, handling of conflict of interest, and the way it deals with whistle-blowers. The trip around the sun is complete: Sam, who we once thought had come to his Icarus moment, is now the most powerful man in this artificial intelligence race. If the board even thinks about ousting him a second time, well, I’m pretty sure they won’t try that again.
I don’t know how I feel about Sam or any of this. I keep thinking back to the fact that the Congressional Black Caucus sent OpenAI a letter asking him to put at least one Black person on the board and we didn’t get that. Scratch that — it doesn’t seem like there is a person of color at all on that board. When people in high-flying places think of diversity, they always pick women, the same kind, too. Women have, of course, been marginalized throughout history, but I can’t stop thinking about the importance of a missing intersectional lens. Early research is starting to show that OpenAI does not yet understand nuance, culture, or diversity. It’s clear that there is not a diverse engineering team building this product, and a staff photo posted back in December proved that. How is this company going to live up to its mission of building a product for all of humanity when its mission, products, and board are so overwhelmingly Eurocentrically white? This is just more of the same — the same people, the same power structures, the same modes of oppression, the same forgotten voices. This is a passing of the reigns, with OpenAI simply taking its rank.
I had heard great things about Sam as an ally. But there was always a tiny, tiny voice in my head that told me he felt familiar. I wrote about it briefly here when, for the first edition of The Black Cat, I pondered how he would be treated if he were a Black woman. Over time, and the more I read about him, I see a man obsessed with power and control — a type that can never be trusted to uphold any societal values when their own greedful desires are put on the line. The OpenAI saga is, at times, fun to watch. Then there are some moments where I remember my place, where I look in the mirror and say, ‘I don’t know why a part of me thought a Black person would be picked for that board.’ It sounds so stupid and truly would have been unprecedented in this world where even the most important Black leaders are given nothing.
Perhaps it is because I wanted Black people to be apart of this story — in a big way. I wanted a moment, I wanted to be in this narrative that is marking this time full of innovation, excitement, and creativity. And once again, like in all technological movements, it seems we are constantly and consistently just pushed aside, ignored, and never given the space to shine like everyone else. As a Black tech reporter, I often feel on the fringe, with thoughts dismissed by the rich white tech barons of today. I guess I am having trouble marrying the idea that Black people will most certainly be most impacted if artificial intelligence is built without the community in mind. That is already a fact well documented. Automated cars hit Black people at high rates because they cannot sense our skin; algorithms are perpetrating existing medical and mortgage biases. Training these models on what is already out there means we are simply just automating existing bias, and perhaps I found it baffling that not one Black person is going to have insight into how this $80 billion juggernaut is going to usher all of humanity into the fifth industrial revolution. I worry about that. If the stakes are as high as Sam says they are, then that means lives are on the line. But the people who will be impacted most are not represented on the board — once again, the fate of our future is in the hands of rich, white people.
In other words, we’re doing this again, and OpenAI is no different than the rest.
I don’t like the fact that Black founders hardly get any money — or chances — to build out innovation at this scale. I don’t love the fact that so many of our Black billionaires are so concentrated in entertainment without any high-level non-superficial links to venture capital that could make them actual players in the arena where power is now distributed. I don’t like the fact that the Black moguls who were qualified for this board seat were overlooked. I don’t like the silence that is here and will remain as the clacking of change tunes out the voices for change. I love the fact that there are a growing amount of Black voices in this space working, working very hard.
But I don’t like the fact that the only Black and brown voices who are a part of OpenAI en masse seem to be the cheap, outsourced content moderators from East Africa, the Philippines, and India, and refugees in Kenya and Lebanon, who have been speaking about the trauma of their exploitation. I wrote a while ago, talking about this new rising crop of tech billionaires, that the utopia they speak of will still have winners and losers—a proletariat and a bourgeoisie—despite them billing every innovation as for all of humanity. When they speak of this humanity, they are not talking about the workers in Kenya or India. They aren’t talking about us. And I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.
💫Kitty Talk💫
Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met: