LISBON, PORTUGAL – NOVEMBER 07: LISBON, PORTUGAL – NOVEMBER 07: Emmett Shear, Twitch, on the Contentmakers 1 Stage Stage during day two of Web Summit 2018 at the Altice Arena on November 7, 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2018, greater than 70,000 attendees from over 170 countries will fly to Lisbon for Web Summit, including over 1,500 startups, 1,200 speakers and a couple of,600 international journalists. (Photo by Eoin Noonan /Web Summit via Getty Images)
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It has been just just a few days since Sam Altman, the former CEO of OpenAI, was ousted in a shock move and temporarily replaced by Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, who served as the firm’s interim CEO. Now, a new substitute for interim CEO of OpenAI has been named.
After a weekend of rumor and speculation, Emmett Shear — former co-founder and CEO of Twitch — confirmed he’ll take the top job at probably the most high-profile AI company in the world. In a post on X early Monday, Shear said he got a call from the company asking him to change into interim CEO of the company.
“After consulting with my family and reflecting on it for just just a few hours, I accepted,” Shear said in the X post. It comes after Altman, who led OpenAI through its development of the wildly popular generative artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, was fired by the OpenAI board.
The explanations behind his departure are unclear, but some insiders had expressed concern that Altman wasn’t the right fit for the company. He is involved in one other company, the eyeball-scanning tech company Worldcoin, for instance, and there have been concerns that this will likely have served as a distraction.
Who is Emmett Shear?
Shear is a giant name in Silicon Valley — but to most individuals, he is unknown.
Shear took Twitch — the live-streaming site he co-founded with Justin Kan, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt in 2007 — from originally broadcasting the lifetime of Kan 24/7, to a worldwide phenomenon.
![Twitch CEO Emmett Shear on the future of Twitch, live streaming](https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/105540195-3ED3-REQ-TWITCH-CEO-V2-103018.jpg?v=1540920164&w=750&h=422&vtcrop=y)
Twitch was acquired by Amazon for $1 billion in 2014 and Shear stepped down as CEO of Twitch last 12 months.
During his time at the company, he faced tensions from streamers who believed that the platform wasn’t defending their interests. It found itself locked in a tense battle with rival YouTube for talent, with the latter attracting several high-profile personalities from Twitch with lucrative exclusive broadcasting deals.
After Shear’s departure from the streaming site, he became a partner at Y Combinator, the startup accelerator. Altman was formerly president of Y Combinator.
Before Shear began Twitch, he was the co-founder of Kiko Calendar, a calendar app he worked on through the 2005 Y Combinator program.
In his post on X Monday, Shear explained why he had taken the OpenAI job.
“I had recently resigned from my role as CEO of Twitch on account of the birth of my now 9 month old son,” Shear said in the post early Monday.
“Spending time with him has been every bit as rewarding as I assumed it could be, and I used to be happily avoiding full time employment.”
“I took this job because I feel that OpenAI is one in every of the most significant corporations currently in existence. When the board shared the situation and asked me to take the role, I didn’t make the decision calmly. Ultimately I felt that I had an obligation to assist if I could,” he added.
Why it matters
The swift elevation of Shear to OpenAI’s CEO puts him answerable for one in every of the most significant corporations in the AI world today.
OpenAI is known for its popular generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
The powerful technology behind that chatbot is called a big language model, or LLM. This is an AI model able to processing and generating human language, based on training from vast amounts of knowledge.
As head of OpenAI, Shear will likely face pressure from regulators who’ve been heavily scrutinizing AI model corporations given the risks the technology poses around misinformation and potential displacement of jobs.
Earlier this month, the U.K. held a pivotal summit on AI safety, attended by major foundational AI corporations, to debate a few of the most pressing issues in the field.
Particularly high on the list of dialogue areas for world leaders was the “existential risk” that AI poses to humans.
Read more CNBC reporting on OpenAI
Altman has himself warned of the threat of AI to eradicate humanity, despite being at the helm of an organization that was working on rapidly advancing the technology.
Notably, like Altman and other tech leaders including Elon Musk, Shear has himself made several comments about the potential for AI to eradicate humanity.
On The Logan Bartlett Show, a podcast hosted by Redpoint Ventures General Partner Logan Bartlett, Shear said he think there is a “five-to-50” likelihood that AI may wipe out all human life today.
Further to this, Shear also said that the potential of AI going rogue in the future “should cause you to shit your pants.”
He added that a potentially sentient artificial intelligence referred to as artificial general intelligence or AGI could result not only in the eradication of humanity, but in addition “potential destruction of all value in the life chain,” and a “universe-destroying bomb.”
Clarification: The headline of this story has been amended to reflect the indisputable fact that Shear has been named interim CEO of OpenAI.