Who is Emmett Shear, the new interim CEO of OpenAI?

Altman’s firing has surprised the tech world, also because OpenAI is currently in talks to close a new funding round that would make the company worth more than $86 billion. With the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the company became a game changer in the field of AI, accumulating 100 million users within two months of release.

It was initially speculated that despite Altman’s firing, reportedly over him not being “consistently candid in his communications” with the OpenAI board, he might return to his post.

However, on Monday, it was also reported that Altman will join Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and incorporated ChatGPT in its Bing search engine. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a tweet, “…We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.”

Who is Emmett Shear?

An alumnus of Yale University, Shear is best known for co-founding the live video-streaming website Twitch in 2011. He stepped down from the Amazon-owned platform earlier this year, when his child was born.

Prior to Twitch, he was associated with Y Combinator, a company which assists start-ups in launching and getting funding. It has helped launch companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit. Sam Altman was also associated with Y Combinator, serving as its President between 2014 and 2019.

In April this year, Shear again joined Y Combinator, as a Visiting Group Partner.

What is happening at OpenAI?

The Information reported that OpenAI board director Ilya Sutskever told the staff that the board members had stood by their decision to remove Altman. His behaviour and interactions with the board undermined the company’s ability to supervise artificial AI development, Sutskever said.

The exact nature of disagreements between the board and Altman is not known at the moment. According to The Information, many employees disagreed about whether the company was developing AI safely and this eventually led to Altman’s firing. Altman was supposedly in favour of raising funds to create an AI chip startup and the board disagreed with this.

In his recent tweet, Shear said, “Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.”

Today I got a call inviting me to consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to become the interim CEO of @OpenAI. After consulting with my family and reflecting on it for just a few hours, I accepted. I had recently resigned from my role as CEO of Twitch due to the birth of my…

— Emmett Shear (@eshear) November 20, 2023

Other media reports, such as from The Atlantic, pointed to a larger disagreement within OpenAI about the pace of AI development and its monetisation, and whether enough guardrails were in place to deal with potential risks.

Shear’s previous comments in a podcast were being shared online, where he is seen calling AI “intrinsically dangerous”. He says it might lead to a civilisational collapse and limits could be set to counter this.

Also in his tweet, Shear outlined his plan for the company, saying, “I have a three point plan for the next 30 days:

– Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report.

– Continue to speak to as many of our employees, partners, investors, and customers as possible, take good notes, and share the key takeaways.

– Reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force to drive results for our customers.”

He added that details of this plan would not necessarily be relayed through public communications.