Adam D’Angelo: The Man Who Will Shape OpenAI’s Future

Just two days after Sam Altman and OpenAI reached an agreement for him to return as CEO, Altman and Adam D’Angelo, a board member who had previously fired him, spent part of their Thanksgiving together. Their lengthy meeting, described by Altman as “really nice,” highlights the unique role D’Angelo plays in the corporate drama that has captivated Silicon Valley. Their relationship is crucial in restoring stability at the world’s most renowned artificial intelligence startup. As part of the deal to bring Altman back, the entire board will be overhauled, except for D’Angelo, who will remain as a director.

D’Angelo’s retention at the company may have surprised some given his role in Altman’s ouster because he was not “consistently honest in his communications with the board.” In an interview during the executive drama, Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures — one of OpenAI’s earliest investors — said he believed D’Angelo stood by his decision despite how much the move upset investors and employees. However, after nearly all of OpenAI’s staff threatened to quit, D’Angelo became a key figure in negotiations with Altman for his return.

D’Angelo’s involvement in the OpenAI saga has brought new attention and scrutiny to the longtime Silicon Valley insider. As the founder of Quora, a question-and-answer site, and an early leader on Facebook, D’Angelo is well known in the industry. When Kevin Systrom launched Instagram and faced technical issues, he thought, “Like, who’s the smartest person I know that I can call?” The answer, as he later told The New York Times, was D’Angelo. But people who have worked with him have also described the Quora CEO as a private, calculating leader — and one with a track record of surprising corporate discrimination. His position on the board has also raised eyebrows because Quora has been increasingly outspoken. competition with OpenAI’s most famous service: ChatGPT. A powerful AI chatbot capable of answering questions in seconds may have undercut at least some of Quora’s user-directed speech. Shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT a year ago, Quora introduced Poe, a platform that allows people to ask questions about various AI chatbots, including ChatGPT. In late October, Poe introduced developers to monetize custom robots they build using its tools. Next month, OpenAI announced that users will be able to build custom versions of ChatGPT and monetize the creations in a new GPT store.

The situation is unusual, said Kellie McElhaney, who teaches corporate social responsibility at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. OpenAI’s board was set up as a non-profit organization, generally without trust restrictions, vetted as carefully as for-profit entities, McElhaney said. While D’Angelo remains on the board, one of his cohorts left due to a conflict of interest. Venture capitalist and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman resigned from OpenAI’s board earlier this year, citing a growing number of investments in AI companies.

“It feels like a breakdown of trust with multiple parties,” McElhaney said. “In some situations, you say the board took its eye off the ball. Nobody here knows what that ball is and where it’s going. A Quora spokesperson said in a statement that Poe is a “neutral platform.” The service “provides consumers around the world with access to AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and many other developers,” the spokesperson said. “Quora does not train these models themselves; our role is to enable model trainers to reach a wider audience.” OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment, and a person familiar with the situation said OpenAI’s board valued the perspective of a customer like Quora among its executives.

D’Angelo has said little publicly since Altman’s ouster, but as rumors swirled about his conflicts and motives, he re-shared a message on X, formerly Twitter, from Replit CEO Amjad Masadi. “I have known Adam D’Angelo for many years,” Masad wrote. “Even though I haven’t spoken to him in a while, the idea that he went crazy or was vindictive because of some overlapping traits or other rumors just seems wrong.” While Altman’s ouster shocked the industry, it wasn’t D’Angelo’s first experience of suddenly firing a company executive. In 2012, his co-founder at Quora, Charlie Cheever, was also ousted. In response to a Quora question about Cheever’s employment, D’Angelo said, “We decided it was best” for his co-founder to step back from day-to-day work at the company.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Cheever had hardly noticed or understood the fault. It was so sudden that employees visited Cheever’s home in tears and asked why he had left. It appears there was little communication about the decision or why it was made, even to staff, the person said. The founders have hardly been in contact since then. In the decade since, D’Angelo has continued to build Quora into a platform for sharing all kinds of knowledge—though it still has a long way to go before it lives up to its lofty prediction. Quora investor Keith Rabois in 2010 that it “will be the most valuable company produced since 2005. Quora has raised about $300 million from big names, according to PitchBook, but nearly 15 years after its launch, it has yet to go public or not has been bought. The company was valued at $2 billion, according to PitchBook, as of 2019. Six years ago, D’Angelo answered a question on Quora that he expected AI to help his startup “in every way” as the technology becomes more efficient,” including helping “people write better answers”. But he also suggested that all bets could be off if and when AI reaches a point where it “can do everything a human can do.”

“I believe some form of information sharing is important in this world, but AI security is a much bigger concern,” he wrote. “I think it’s good that some people are thinking about security issues now, but I personally don’t think it’s constructive to worry about the world instead of adapting as it approaches.”