The former Secretary of the United States Treasury, Larry Summers, announced this Wednesday his resignation from the board of directors of OpenAI, the start-up fashionable by artificial intelligence (AI), several days after the one Summers had with the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Summers himself said in a statement sent to Axios: “Consistent with my announcement to withdraw from my public commitments, I have also decided to resign from the OpenAI board of directors.” The former president added that he appreciated “the opportunity to have served, I am excited by the company’s potential and I look forward to following its progress.”
Summers, also a former president of Harvard University, declared Monday that he would withdraw from all public engagements, adding that this move would allow him to “rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.” In a statement collected by Bloomberg, the former president said: “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and I recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my ill-advised decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” declared Summers, who was Secretary of the United States Treasury from 1999 to 2001, and one of the figures in the country’s financial world.
In the case of OpenAI, Summers accompanied other senior managers and prominent figures in US teaching. The company has a board of directors made up of independents such as Bret Taylor, former CEO of Salesforce, as president; plus Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora; Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Zico Kolter, professor at Carnegie Mellon University; retired US Army General Paul M. Nakasone; Adebayo Ogunlesi, founder and CEO of Global Infrastructure Partners; Nicole Seligman, former head of Sony Corporation; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and the aforementioned Summers.
“Larry has decided to resign from the OpenAI Board of Directors, and we respect his decision. We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to the board,” said the company. start-up in a statement.
Separately, Harvard University announced Monday that it will open a new investigation into the former Treasury Secretary’s connections to Epstein. Summers, the former president of Harvard University, where he is currently a professor, has been in the spotlight after newly released documents revealed that he and Epstein had an “unusually close relationship for years,” the university newspaper reported Tuesday. The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives on Tuesday to force the release of the Justice Department’s files on Epstein, an outcome Trump had fought for months.
OpenAI has become the start-up most valuable in the world, after reaching a valuation of 500,000 million dollars in the recent transaction of sale of shares by workers and former employees. The firm has surpassed SpaceX in the ranking, the start-up Elon Musk’s space services company, and ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.
The company has closed the agreement to become a for-profit company. A key step for its future IPO. In fact, the market is already talking about a valuation of up to one trillion dollars.
The start-up It has among its main shareholders Microsoft and SoftBank, which recently insisted on its commitment to OpenAI, worth $40 billion in March of this year. Additionally, in September it closed an alliance with Nvidia, through which the AI chip manufacturer would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, which has also closed agreements with other chip manufacturers such as Broadcom and AMD.
Other resignations
Summers, a Harvard professor, stated that he will continue to fulfill his teaching obligations, but that he will withdraw from his public commitments as part of a broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with those close to him, according to Bloomberg. In this case, his withdrawal from public commitments includes his participation as a paid contributor to Bloomberg TV, as confirmed by a Bloomberg News spokesperson.
Additionally, the Harvard Crimson will not renew its contract with Summers for its opinion section. Likewise, according to The New York Times, Summers will resign from several positions, including the chairmanship of the board of the Center for Global Development, a fellowship at the Center for American Progress and a position at the Yale Budget Laboratory.
