ChatGPT picks OpenAI's CEO successor

What a tumultuous week in the world of AI leadership! With Sam Altman reinstated as CEO of OpenAI after being fired just a few days ago.

OpenAI shot to fame earlier this year following the release of ChatGPT 3.0 which brought Large Language Models (LLMs) and the power of generative AI into the mainstream. Since then, it’s been a rollercoaster ride as OpenAI have released subsequent improved models and created new products, and many other companies have raced to release and improve their own LLMs.

Sam Altman back in post marks the end of a dramatic week exposing the challenges of selecting high profile leaders and systematically planning for CEO change.

Whether the reversal heavily influenced by shareholders and employees is ultimately the right decision for OpenAI remains to be seen. But what if ChatGPT could give their Board suggestions for who should be considered as Altman’s successor? The problem for anyone that has tried this is that ChatGPT won’t give people recommendations for roles. Or give you LinkedIn profile suggestions.

Computer says no.

 There is, however, another AI tool that will offer executive candidate suggestions.

MapX is an LLM based executive recruitment platform which is integrated with ChatGPT. If we ask MapX for suggestions for a replacement for Sam Altman it consults ChatGPT as part of its process. MapX’s LLMs replicate the same process used by headhunters and their teams i.e. deciding on which industries and companies to search in and then finding the people who have relevant remits and experience from those companies.

Let’s see who MapX suggests as a replacement for Sam Altman. We start with a simple prompt “Ideas for a new CEO of OpenAI based in the US”:

From this prompt, MapX returns 100+ ideas. Here are some of the suggestions:

Drew Houston - Founder & CEO of Dropbox and Board of Directors at Meta

After a couple of early startups, Drew founded Dropbox which he’s successfully grown to one of the most well-known file sharing products in the world. His Board role at Meta will have kept him close to LLM development at one of OpenAI’s biggest competitors.

Ryan Aytay - President & CEO, Tableau

Ryan’s background is in investment banking before spending the early part of his career as a Management Consultant at Deloitte. Joining Salesforce in 2007, he’s overseen strategic partnerships, product management and most recently the revenue growth and leadership of Tableau after Salesforce’s acquisition of the prominent BI tool. Given the application of LLMs to business intelligence, strategy and planning, Ryan could prove to be an interesting choice.

Marissa Mayer – CEO of Sunshine and Board of Directors at Walmart

Marissa’s early career was at Google where she worked on consumer web services, search products and maps. Formerly President and CEO of Yahoo Marissa currently sits on the Board of Directors at Walmart and co-founder of Sunshine, an AI based startup focused on task automation. Marissa took some flack from her time as CEO at Yahoo but with the benefit of hindsight, navigating the business to a sale to Verizon for $4.48bn would be a significant achievement given Yahoo’s dwindling business and customer base at the time. At a time when OpenAI need a prominent public figure to be the external face of the business, Marissa would be a good choice given her experience leading more mature technology businesses.

Tony Bates – Chairman and CEO of Genesys and Board member at VMware

Gensys are a software development company that also has capabilities around AI, chatbots and other types of conversational AI. A former EVP at Microsoft, Tony has had an all-star career serving as CEO of Skype, President of GoPro and sitting on the Board at eBay and SiriusXM. Highly experienced and with both consumer brand and business brand background.

Timothy Campos - VP and CIO at Apple

With more technical experience than other suggestions and a wealth of experience in the operational side of technology, Timothy has previously held the CIO role at Facebook, KLA and has been a Director of Viavi the telecoms business and Rackspace, the hosting business. Perhaps not as innovation or AI focused as some of the other suggestions but as the person responsible for the system performance of Apple’s infrastructure behind its online services, support and website, he is used to delivering enterprise grade technology performance for one of the world’s biggest brands.

In these first suggestions, three of the five options have current or previous Board experience at large, mature consumer facing organisations. And you can see why that type of profile would be relevant for a company like OpenAI which has had to mature quickly and is facing ongoing challenges relating to AI safety and other issues requiring a CEO who is comfortable in the limelight.

The last pick of Timothy Campos made me realise that these first suggestions were majoring on general management experience. OpenAI might instead want someone from a more technical path. So let’s try a slightly different prompt with more detail and see how that changes the results:

“A new CEO for OpenAI working at a technology company that uses AI and Large Language Models. This person should have a technical background, likely as a former CTO, and have worked for a well-known brand.”

Caroline Yap - Managing Director of Google’s Global AI Business

Caroline plays a public role for Google, advising enterprise clients and customers on how to harness the power of AI/ML technology. She also sits as a Board Advisor to two cloud businesses, has a technical background holding Architect roles at Siemens, VMware, Cisco, and has held Product, Strategy and Research roles at EMC, Microsoft and Dell.

Adnan Masood, PhD – Chief Architect at UST and Regional Director at Microsoft

With Sam Altman and Greg Brockman apparently spearheading Microsoft’s AI Research team, perhaps a move the other way would appeal to OpenAI? Adnan has a deep background in AI Research and provides both technical direction and leadership to UST’s Innovation and Machine Learning Group. And as a Regional Director at Microsoft, plays a key customer facing role for the company. He also has a PhD in Machine Learning.

Cal Henderson – Co-founder & CTO at Slack

Cal previously held Director of Technology roles and Engineering roles at emap and Flickr before leaving to co-found Slack. He’s been instrumental to the success of that business as it’s grown over the last 14 years to one of the most popular workplace efficiency apps. Three years on from Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack, could Cal be looking for his next challenge?

Colette Kress - EVP/CFO Nvidia

Colette is the only person featured here who has come predominantly from a finance route, holding a corporate VP job at Microsoft before moving to SVP CFO, Business Technology at Cisco. Given OpenAIs reliance on chips supplied primarily by Nvidia, Colette might bring both the stability that you associate with CFOs to the business and a good network of talent from her previous firms.

Shamim Habib Wani - CTO Data & AI at Accenture

Shamim has held a number of divisional management roles at Accenture, focusing on Data, Architecture and Engineering. Currently leading Accenture’s Data & AI practice, Shamim comes from a systems engineering and solutions architect route at Amazon, Teradata and AmerisourceBergen.

So there’s a glimpse of 10 AI-generated ideas for OpenAI’s next CEO. Only time will tell whether the re-hire of Altman is the right decision.

What is clear, however, is that AI has an interesting role to play in enhancing hiring at the very highest levels.

You can try MapX for free today here.

Alex Martin

CEO & Founder MapX and Managing Partner, Talent Intelligence, Savannah Group

amartin@mapx-ai.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amgmart/

MapX is an LLM based leadership hiring platform. Backed by Savannah Group and built by a team of headhunters and technologists. MapX makes finding and comparing the worlds best leaders and companies faster and easier.