Bret Taylor may be Silicon Valley’s most in-demand techie these days.
The 43-year-old co-creator of Google Maps and former co-CEO of Salesforce, served as chairman of Twitter’s board during Elon Musk’s chaotic 2022 acquisition, running point on the contentious negotiations with Musk.
In November when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was abruptly fired and rehired during the course of a frenetic weekend, Taylor was recruited to join OpenAI’s board as Chair in the pact that was brokered to resolve the situation.
On Wednesday, Taylor launched Sierra, a startup he cofounded with former Google exec Clay Bavor, focused on building AI chatbots for businesses. As Fortune reported, Sierra has already raised $110 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark.
Does Taylor’s role on OpenAI’s board of directors present a problem now that he’s the CEO of Sierra, another AI company? After all, venture capitalist Reid Hoffman gave up his seat on OpenAI’s board last year to avoid the perception of any conflicts of interest with other AI startups he’s involved with.
Taylor does not see an inherent conflict between his role at OpenAI and at Sierra. “My job at OpenAI is really not around day-to-day operations but governance,” Taylor told Fortune in an interview ahead of the Sierra launch. He emphasized that he doesn’t view Sierra as directly competing with OpenAI initiatives. “We’re customers with OpenAI in addition to a number of others,” Taylor said.
“We’re at a slightly higher altitude. We’re not building artificial general intelligence, right? We’re creating a product for enterprises,” Taylor said, contrasting Sierra’s customer service oriented chatbots to AGI, a still-theoretical type of AI that proponents hope will be able to perform most tasks as well as or better than humans.
Still, Taylor said he can simply recuse himself from the decision-making process “whenever there is a potential for overlap.”
As for his decision to join the OpenAI board when he was already deep in the process of launching his own startup, Taylor cited the importance of OpenAI’s goal to create AGI.
“I took on the role because I care so much about the OpenAI mission and I was—like many other people in the world—pretty anxious over the course of that weekend that the mission was at risk,” Taylor said, referring to the shake-up at OpenAI that temporarily banished Altman from the company.
“I consider it one of the privileges of my career to be able to participate in that mission just because the opportunity for artificial general intelligence to be able to benefit all of humanity is one of the most important missions of our time,” he said.
Read the full story here — Exclusive: Ex-Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor and longtime Googler Clay Bavor raised $110 million to bring AI ‘agents’ to business
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