OpenAI has lost another board member with the departure of former Texas representative Will Hurd, who announced at the end of June that he was entering the field of 2024 presidential candidates.
Hurd is the third director to leave the ChatGPT maker’s board this year. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman announced he was stepping down due to investment conflicts in March, two months before he launched the chatbot startup Inflection AI. Neuralink Corp. executive and Elon Musk associate Shivon Zilis also left the OpenAI board in March, the tech news site the Information reported.
In a statement about his departure, Hurd said he resigned before he began his campaign in order to focus on politics. “It was an incredible privilege to be part of OpenAl’s important work,” he said, “and I am deeply grateful for the experience because of the invaluable lessons learned about fostering innovation and developing responsible Al.”
Hurd, a three-time Republican congressman, joined the OpenAI board in May 2021 as a public policy expert. At the time, OpenAI’s Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman praised Hurd’s unique background of politics and technical knowledge for being helpful for the startup, which is one of the top AI-related companies. Before his political career, Hurd worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and was a cybersecurity executive.
“Will brings a rare combination of expertise — he deeply understands both artificial intelligence as well as public policy, both of which are critical to a successful future for AI,” Altman wrote at the time.
Hurd joined the large field of political candidates for the 2024 presidential race by calling out GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. “If we nominate a lawless, selfish, failed politician like Donald Trump who lost the House, the Senate and the White House, we all know Joe Biden will win again,” Hurd said in his campaign launch video. “Republicans deserve better. America deserves better.”
The remaining OpenAI board members are evenly split between employees and non-employees. OpenAI’s representatives include CEO Altman, President Greg Brockman and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. The three non-employees are Quora Inc. CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
ChatGPT is being probed by the Federal Trade Commission, which is seeking information on whether the conversational AI bot harms consumers, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. In March, a tech ethics group filed a complaint with the FTC, urging the regulator to halt further commercial deployment of GPT-4, the language model behind ChatGPT.
--With assistance from Rachel Metz.
(Adds details of FTC probe in last paragraph)