LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is stepping down from OpenAI's board after eight years.
The decision came "after months of conversations with Sam (Altman), Greylock colleagues, and friends," Hoffman wrote in a LinkedIn post on Friday, in order to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest with his other companies and investments.
"As OpenAI’s APIs become more important to the next wave of AI applications, Greylock and I will be investing in companies, like Tome and Coda, that will use the OpenAI APIs," Hoffman wrote.
Hoffman participated in a $1 billion grant funding round when OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and then invested in the company's $10 million Series A round in 2019.
More recently, Hoffman co-founded another AI company called Inflection AI in 2022 with Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan. Based in Palo Alto, Inflection AI has raised $265 million from Polaris Partners and Greylock Partners, where Hoffman is a partner. Inflection is reportedly seeking up to $675 million in new funding, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
OpenAI publicly released its image and text generators DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT last year, sparking immense interest in generative AI. Originally formed as a non-profit, the company launched a paid version of ChatGPT in February. It will charge users $20 monthly for premium access to the tool.
So-called "generative AI" can create content from simple text prompts in plain English, and is capable of engaging in back-and-forth conversations with users.
Microsoft announced a multiyear agreement with OpenAI in January that was reportedly worth $10 billion and cemented Microsoft as OpenAI's exclusive cloud services provider. The tech giant had previously invested more than $3 billion into OpenAI since 2019, according to the NYT.
