That's a fascinating question. I looked into this and haven't a clue, other than Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wife (?). If it's the same person, then she is a "tech-entrepreneur" with a surprising amount of liquidity and automatic privilege and titles despite no obvious achievement (unless you consider title-gathering an achievement).
Looks like Tasha grew up in Santa Monica and currently works for RAND corporation. This is probably the most prestigious Defense think tank.
The other board member, Helen Toner list for her twitter profile: "Interests: China+ML, natsec+tech..." and works for another Defense think tank.
If there's one way the CEO of fastest growing company in the world could get fired, it's to essentially get his metaphoric security clearance pulled like Oppenheimer did.
The Oppenheimer analogy is closer than it sounds. Once the military had the technical knowledge of making the bomb, Oppenheimer was more of a liability with his pacifist leanings and had to be removed.
None of these actions should be considered unusual from a woman (and probably a man, too) who was involved in a decision the result of which (with or without knowing the context) would piss off a lot of men. The only social media it's safe to leave open are those that allow shutting down of all DMs, and don't divulge information which could identify the physical places she habituates.
No this can definitely be considered unusual, and it's misguided to paint it as angry men online. She participated in a decision that affects all of us (leadership/alignment of AI) and is now attempting to hide from the consistences of that participation (privatizing profile and change the name). You don't get to make big decisions and then hide under a rock.
You obviously haven't paid attention to the sorts of threats women who make decisions that piss off "bros" are subjected to. She isn't hiding under a rock through these actions (though may be doing things in the real world to hide). These actions just proactively limit being DMed threats.
Even without threats, no one wants to deal with the thousands of spur-of-the-moment DMs and emails that such a notable action would prompt. It's a good idea to go offline until things cool down. Any necessary statements can be made through channels, and so can the answers to questions.
"Any necessary statements can be made through channels"
you have to admin though, she made a highly controversial decision, and instead of confronting it and saying something through her own channel, she changed the name of the channel and made it private. And we're supposed to assume this is because men (specifically) are mean. Respectfully, feels like a bad take.
We technically don't even know if she voted for the expulsion, and we probably never will. 3-to-1 would work.
As an active board member she has certain legal obligations at this moment. This is why the Try Guys dragged their feet on making public statements about Ned Fulmer's expulsion from the company, and when they did finally make a statement did so as a group and explicitly stated that they couldn't talk about certain things.
OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.
There were 6 on the board until noon today. Assuming Sam and Greg did not vote, that leaves 4. If 3 voted out, that would have been a split decision. I don't think a 50% decision would have it, I believe all 4 of the remaining members voted out.
That leaves us wondering what the hell happened, and how it came to this? It's not angry tech bros, it's folks who feel OpenAI is a great company poised to lead AI into a bright future with principles and a purpose higher than profit. And now Sam and Greg are gone.
And poof, this human who happens to be female is gone. This human needed to have a statement ready, we're all trying to DM them the same question, why?
She was involved with starting "Fellow Robots" in 2014, which is a spin-off of some sketchy for-profit AI "university" deal called "Singularity University".
AFAICT she's notable because she's been an academic and executive in the field for many years, in many different companies.
Singularity University was such a funny grift. Google must have figured the best way to monetize Ray Kurzweil was to put him on a stage at the NASA/Moffett center and have him perform magic shows in front of the moneyed class. And you know, they were probably right. Not like he can still code or anything, and the lines were out the door and down the street. I visited a couple of times when my sister's old boyfriend was working there. They had all kinds of fun little booths and displays for people going through the bootcamp to gawk at.
I'm imagining the kind of person who starts their career as an executive at a spinoff of SU.
"An investigative report from Bloomberg Businessweek found many issues with the organization, including an alleged sexual harassment of a student by a teacher, theft and aiding of theft by an executive, and allegations of gender and disability discrimination.[12] Several early members of Singularity University were convicted of crimes, including Bruce Klein, who was convicted in 2012 of running a credit fraud operation in Alabama, and Naveen Jain, who was convicted of insider trading in 2003.[12]
In February 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, MIT Technology Review reported that a group owned by Singularity, called Abundance 360, had held a "mostly maskless" event in Santa Monica ... The event, led by Singularity co-founder Peter Diamandis, charged up to $30,000 for tickets."
I think this is a legitimate question. There seems to be little public information about this board member, besides that they are married to a celebrity.
