OpenAI: OpenAI Appoints Veteran AI Professor Zico Kolter to Board

OpenAI has named Zico Kolter, professor and director of machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, to its board of directors, the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence startup said Thursday.

Developer ChatGPT’s board of directors has undergone a series of changes amid growing concerns about the security of generative AI as more companies rush to adopt the emerging technology.

The company said Kolter, whose work primarily focuses on AI security, will also join OpenAI’s board of directors’ safety and security committee, alongside CEO Sam Altman and directors Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Paul Nakasone, and Nicole Seligman.

The security committee, established in May, makes recommendations on security decisions for all OpenAI projects.

OpenAI chatbots with genAI capabilities, such as conducting human-like conversations and generating images from text messages, are raising security concerns as AI models become more powerful.

Kolter, formerly chief data scientist at C3.ai, currently serves as chief data scientist at Bosch and chief technical advisor at Gray Swan, a startup specializing in AI security.

In 2023, Kolter contributed to the development of methods for automatically assessing the security of large language models, demonstrating the potential to bypass existing model protections, according to an OpenAI blog post. Microsoft resigned from its board observer seat at OpenAI in July, in a move intended to ease concerns from U.S. and U.K. antitrust regulators about the scope of its control over the startup amid growing genAI adoption.