Who is Emmett Shear? New interim CEO of OpenAI who once called AI a ‘universe destroying bomb’

OpenAI, a company that took the world by storm with its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, now appears to have landed itself in troubled waters. The company fired its ex-CEO and face of the AI revolution, Sam Altman, who joined Microsoft on Monday.

Altman’s new role was announced Monday by Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, after failed talks between the board of OpenAI and its ex-CEO. Altman will now be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.

Meanwhile, OpenAI announced Emmett Shear as its new interim CEO in one of the most dramatic twists from Silicon Valley’s boardrooms.

It is noteworthy that the power shuffle took place before ChatGPT’s one-year launch. The revolutionary large language model-based chatbot was launched by OpenAI on Nov 30 last year.

Here’s everything you need to know about the new OpenAI CEO, Emmett Shear.

Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, has now been installed as the new interim CEO of OpenAI. Twitch was co-founded by Shear but was later acquired by Amazon in 2014. Shear remained the chief executive of Twitch till March this year, where he spent around a decade turning it from Justin.tv into the most successful idea of game streaming service in the world.

Shear was named as the new interim CEO replacing Mira Murati, who was earlier given the same portfolio in a management reshuffle. 

Shear grew up in Seattle and met Justin Kan at the age of 8, who later became his co-founder for Justin.tv and Twitch. Shear received a Bachelor of Science with a major in computer science in 2005 from Yale University. 

He then joined Y Combinator in 2005, where he built a calendar application called Kilo, and later became a part-time partner at the start-up accelerator in June 2011. During his stint at Y Combinator, he offered advice to the new start-ups in each batch. 

In June 2011, when Justin.tv decided to spin off the gaming content under a separate brand and site, Shear became the CEO of the new company- Twitch. 

Shear is also linked to the effective altruism movement, as per a Bloomberg report. The movement is sceptical about the risks posed by AI and people part of the movement have imaged various scenarios in which AI could be used to cause serious and widespread harm. 

Speaking about the possibility of a hyper-intelligent AI getting out of human control, Shear said (as quoted by the Wall Street Journal), “It’s like a universe destroying bomb…It’s bad in a way that makes global warming not a problem.”

(With inputs from agencies)