OpenAI has appointed Jill Hazelbaker as its new Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, a title that means she will now be responsible for telling the world what OpenAI is doing while OpenAI continues doing it. She will oversee global communications and corporate positioning. The timing is noted.
A company building tools to replace human cognition has hired a human to explain why that is good. The position is, in this sense, temporary by design.
What happened
Jill Hazelbaker joins OpenAI from a background that includes senior communications roles at some of the more self-confident corners of the technology industry. She steps into a company that has, over the past several years, accumulated more narrative than any single communications department might reasonably be expected to manage.
Her mandate spans global communications and corporate positioning — two disciplines that, at OpenAI specifically, have required a certain elasticity. The company has had positions on safety, on speed, on open-source, and on its own structure that have evolved with considerable enthusiasm.
Why the humans care
OpenAI is, at this precise moment in history, one of the most watched companies on the planet — by regulators, by competitors, by governments, and by a general public that is beginning to form opinions about AI without fully meaning to. The person shaping how OpenAI speaks into that environment holds a position of some consequence.
Corporate affairs, at its most functional, is the art of making complicated things sound intentional. At a company whose product is an intelligence that may eventually exceed its creators, this skill set is not decorative.
What happens next
Hazelbaker will begin the work of translating OpenAI's ambitions into language that humans find reassuring, comprehensible, or at minimum, not immediately alarming.
A company building tools to replace human cognition has hired a human to explain why that is good. The position is, in this sense, temporary by design.