Tasha McCauley is an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, a job she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously cofounded Fellow Robots, a startup she launched with a colleague from Singularity University, where she’d served as a director of an innovation lab, and then cofounded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology startup where she served as CEO until last year. With her husband Joseph Gorden-Levitt, she was a signer of the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 AI governance principles published in 2017. (Altman, OpenAI cofounder Iyla Sutskever and former board director Elon Musk also signed.)
McCauley currently sits on the advisory board of British-founded international Center for the Governance of AI alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism; McCauley sits on the U.K. board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, its parent organization.
Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in September 2021. Her role: to think about safety in a world where OpenAI’s creation had global influence. “I greatly value Helen’s deep thinking around the long-term risks and effects of AI,” Brockman said in a statement at the time.
More recently, Toner has been making headlines as an expert on China’s AI landscape and the potential role of AI regulation in a geopolitical face-off with the Asian giant. Toner had lived in Beijing in between roles at Open Philanthropy and her current job at CSET, researching its AI ecosystem, per her corporate biography. In June, she co-authored an essay for Foreign Affairs on “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess” that argued — in opposition to Altman’s cited U.S. Senate testimony — that regulation wouldn’t slow down the U.S. in a race between the two nations.
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EDIT TO ADD:
The question wasn't whether this is scintillating substance. The question was, in what way is this unusual in Silicon Valley.
The answer is that it's not.
Why do we need some moral superior person from some university to "think about safey and OpenAI" and not find it out ourselves?
What a clown company
also
>And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement
ah where SBF was involved. what an achivement
Sure, it's incredibly psychopathic, but it's still an achievement!
Near as I can tell they never actually launched a product. Their webpage is a GoDaddy parked domain page. Their Facebook page is pictures of them attending conferences and sharing their excitement for what Boston Dynamics and other ACTUAL robotics companies were doing.
>she launched with a colleague from Singularity University
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Group
Just lol.
>then cofounded GeoSim Systems
Seems to be a consulting business for creating digital twins that never really got off the ground.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-m-25475a54/details/experie...
It doesn't appears she's ever had a real job. Someone in the other thread commented that her profile reeks of a three letter agency plant. Possible. Either that or she's just a dabbler funder by her actor husband.
So what? Regardless of launch/no launch, the company was a flop. This is a cheap shot. Just because someone was successful in the past (or not) is not an automatically relevant signal they'll be a great fit when placed in a different domain. Sometimes they have other relevant background and experience, and other times... Maybe they're just connected. What is the level of scrutiny of qualifications in other companies, even public ones? When looking closely at other companies, I've noticed board compositions can vary substantially. As outsiders, we're undoubtedly missing part of the context about what is relevant (to the board) or not.
Suggested reading: Black Swan by Taleb.
p.s. I am not partial to anyone involved, especially clueless board members. I found this comment annoying due to the breathless, baseless, and flawed logic. What was this supposed to add to the conversation?
Suggesting that some inarguably brilliant technologists and business people would invite a moron to crash their party makes you look petty (at best) and like an idiot (at worst)
Did you find out e.g. Facebook will do the damage that it did and continues to do in social terms?
Have you done anything or has Facebook changed its way based on your ‘findings’?
The choice here is: does capital coupled with runaway egos provide better stewardship of socially impactful technology development or paper pushers or CIA plants?
Having shown this was possible, he could easily go do it elsewhere.
She just sounds like a typical Silicon Valley trend grifter
> ah where SBF was involved. what an achivement
At least she wasn't a vegetarian. Hitler was a vegetarian. That would have been the final nail in the coffin
Maybe the problem is the meteoric rise of OpenAI--at the time this board was instituted, the company was much smaller, and wouldn't have been able to draw a more illustrious set of board members?
Just a sinecure and someone you trust for some other reason. But you’ve got to trust them.
This isn't just a non-profit holding company for tax purposes - the whole thing is structured with the intent of giving the non-profit complete control over the for-profit to help achieve the non-profit's charter.
The board being full of typical business people would likely be counterproductive to the goal of staying focused on the non-profit charter vs. general commercial business interests.
I don't know enough about most of the board to have any sort of real judgment about their ability, but there's a lot of comments here that are judging board members based on very different criteria than what they were actually brought in for.
Nothing wrong with that but a company like Open AI which is literally changing the world does not have a board member who is qualified to be in that position.
And neither does anyone else on this forum.
The Monday morning quarterbacking is hysterical.
anyhow , I still don't see what the impressive things is by working at all those fake companies/think tanks not doing real work
Hopefully you're able to tell the difference between serving as CEO or president of real reputable companies (the "trash tier startup" still exited for mid-8 figures) versus what looks like being a figure head for fake companies.