OpenAI adds a Carnegie Mellon professor to its board of directors

OpenAI has announced a new appointment to its board of directors: Zico Kolter.

Kolter, a professor and director of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon, predominantly focuses his research on AI safety. This makes him an “invaluable technical director for [OpenAI’s] governance,” OpenAI writes in a post on its official blog.

AI safety has been a big issue at the company. Kolter’s appointment comes a few months after several prominent OpenAI executives and employees focused on safety, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, left the company. Several of these resignations came from Sutskever’s former “Superalignment” team, which was focused on ways to govern “superintelligent” AI systems, but which a source says was denied access to the computing resources originally promised.

Kolter will also join the OpenAI board’s Safety and Security Committee alongside directors Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Paul Nakasone, Nicole Seligman, CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI technical experts. The committee is responsible for making recommendations on safety and security decisions for all OpenAI projects — but, as we noted in a piece in May, it’s made up of mostly insiders, which has raised questions among pundits about its effectiveness.

Said OpenAI board chairman Taylor in a statement: “Zico adds deep technical understanding and perspective in AI safety and robustness that will help us ensure general artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

Kolter, formerly chief data scientist at C3.ai, completed his PhD in computer science at Stanford University in 2010, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT from 2010 to 2012. His research includes demonstrating the potential to bypass existing AI safeguards through automated optimization techniques. 

No stranger to industry collaborations, Kolter is currently “chief expert” at Bosch and the chief technical advisor at AI startup Gray Swan.