Anna Makanju, Vice President of Global Affairs, OpenAI
Anna Makanju is OpenAI's Vice President of Global Affairs, leading the company's policy and engagement strategy. She previously worked on technology regulation at Facebook and taught at Princeton. Anna spent eight years in the Obama/Biden administration, where she served as a senior policy advisor to the Vice President and in a number of national security and foreign policy roles at the White House, Department of State, and Pentagon.
At OpenAI, a research and development organization focused on artificial intelligence, Anna Adeola Makanju serves as the Vice President of Global Affairs, with the goal of creating potent tools that would advance humankind. She had previously served as Vice President Biden’s Special Policy Advisor for Europe and Eurasia and, before that, as the Permanent Representative of the United States Mission to the United Nations’ Senior Policy Advisor. She also held the positions of Chief of Staff for European and NATO Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Director for Russia at the National Security Council.
When Anna was sixteen years old, she enrolled at Western Washington University. She completed her studies there with a BA in languages and French, spending her last year at the University of Nantes in France. She started working for Chef Tom Douglas in Seattle before attending Stanford University to study law.
After graduating from law school, Anna worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court, and as Judge Theodore McKee’s clerk on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. She worked in Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton LLP’s international arbitration group after completing her clerkship. In 2009, she joined the Obama administration after quitting her job at Cleary Gottlieb to serve as a field organizer for the Obama for America campaign.
2023
Before Sam Altman was fired, OpenAI was allegedly developing a cutting-edge system that was so potent that it raised worries about worker safety.
According to Reuters, several OpenAI researchers were so concerned about the artificial intelligence model that they wrote to the board of directors prior to Altman’s removal, expressing concern that it would endanger humankind.
The tech news site the Information said that the Q* model, which is pronounced as “Q-Star,” was able to handle simple math problems that it had never seen before. The article also mentioned that some safety researchers were concerned about the system’s rapid progress. One would consider the capacity to answer arithmetic problems to be a major advancement in artificial intelligence.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the name for a system that can do a wide range of activities at human or above human levels of intellect. Many experts are concerned that businesses like OpenAI are moving too rapidly towards achieving AGI, which may theoretically elude human control.
OpenAI has appointed Sam Altman as its new CEO after an attempted coup by board members. Altman, who quit in protest, will join the company’s board of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. The company has also appointed new board members, including former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor and Quora founder Adam D’Angelo. However, the company has not provided an update on Emmett Shear’s appointment as the new CEO.
