Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Sam Altman will return to the board of OpenAI after a review into the events that lead to his dramatic ousting from the ChatGPT maker found no evidence that he should have been sacked.
Altman was fired as chief executive and removed from the board of the artificial intelligence company he co-founded in November. The remaining board members reversed course days later, reinstating him as chief executive and stepping down instead.
A review into the boardroom chaos concluded there had been a significant breakdown of trust between the previous board and Altman, but found no evidence that the chief executive had misled investors or pushed product releases at an unsafe pace.
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“This was simply a breakdown in trust between the board and Mr Altman,” said former Salesforce boss Bret Taylor, who was appointed as an OpenAI director after the previous board was disbanded.
Following the boardroom coup, Taylor commissioned law firm WilmerHale to conduct an independent investigation into Altman’s behaviour and the decision to remove him.
Following the conclusion of that review on Friday, Taylor’s special committee “expressed its full confidence in Mr Altman and Mr (Greg) Brockman’s ongoing leadership of OpenAI.”
OpenAI announced three more new board members on Friday: Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former head of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former president of Sony Entertainment, and Fidji Simo, chief executive of Instacart. Former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers was appointed to the board late last year.
new video loaded: The Decline of America’s Largest Environmental Organization
David A. Fahrenthold, an investigative reporter, describes the struggles of the Sierra Club, one of the largest environmental groups in the U.S. The group has lost about 60 percent of its supporters since 2020.
By David A. Fahrenthold, Leila Medina, Karen Hanley, Laura Bult, Joey Sendaydiego, Christina Thornell, Zach Wood and Jon Miller
Two buildings on Joint Base Andrews were evacuated Thursday after someone opened a suspicious package in one of them, a base spokesperson told CBS News.
The spokesperson said that at about 1:00 p.m. EST, the building and one connected to it were evacuated “as a precaution,” adding that “a cordon was established around the area.
“Joint Base Andrews first responders were dispatched to the scene, determined there were no immediate threats, and have turned the scene over to Office of Special Investigations. An investigation is currently ongoing.”
The base, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, is the home base of Air Force One.
Executives raised myriad questions with management. From the outset, “we did a fair amount of warnings to make sure that the leadership, especially at the board level, were aware of these risks”, said the senior executive.
Where would the 9mn people due to populate The Line come from? How quickly could they be reasonably expected to arrive? Could construction and manufacturing start quickly enough? Would the levels of imports required overheat the economy? What if oil prices sank, drying up Saudi Arabia’s key source of revenue? What if the necessary materials could not be found? And did the Gulf nation really have the scientific and technical expertise to execute such a vast scheme?
Yet the pressure to deliver was relentless. The board expected the chief executive to “move things very quickly”, said the senior executive. “Dates had been given to the crown prince about what was achievable, but without the detail of knowing how it could be done,” said the senior design manager. When those dates were made public, there would be a loss of face if they weren’t met. “That’s where tensions grew.”
Staff were “being put into a position of effectively having to lie about the timescales and the cost of delivering the vision”, they added.
What remains
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The Line — or at least its beginnings — can already be seen from space. Satellite imagery shows excavation and tunnelling work for the railway system, the “spine” connecting The Line to Neom International Airport, stretching for 150km — from the coast into the Hejaz mountains.
In a valley between two mountain ranges, levelling work is evident for the airport and its runways. “In true Neom fashion, there’s a mountain at the end of the runway that had to be blown up,” said the senior architect. Construction work has now stopped on both the spine and the airport. No new target for the airport has been set.
The foundations for The Line’s first modules — perhaps the largest piles ever laid by man — are also visible, waiting to support the world’s largest occupied building, if it ever arrives. The village of Qayal, which was a few kilometres from the “hidden marina”, has been razed. Fifteen members of the Huwaitat tribe who protested against their eviction were sent to prison, some for up to 50 years, and three others were sentenced to death, according to human rights observers.
At the marina, excavations by late last year had dug out 100mn cubic metres of soil, the equivalent of 40 Great Pyramids of Giza. Ships will access it via a canal leading more than a kilometre inland from the coast.
The chandelier, the upside-down office building hanging from the giant arch above the marina, remains in the plans. But Neom no longer intends to base its headquarters there. Neom’s deputy chief executive Rayan Fayez acknowledged last month that the project’s budget “evolves every day”, adding that it was a good point to “reassess what worked and what hasn’t worked”.
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With the goal now to build just three of the 20 modules originally planned, the ambition for The Line’s first phase is a faint echo of what it once was. One person familiar with the project said work had effectively stopped, with efforts now focused on completing a few small buildings around the marina. Some of the earlier piling work has been covered with sand.
“I think as a thought experiment, great,” said one urban planning expert who works in Saudi Arabia. “But don’t build thought experiments.”
