A leadership crisis at OpenAI ultimately led to the artificial intelligence company replacing its CEO, with tech entrepreneur Emmett Shear becoming its new chief executive.
Meanwhile, co-founder Sam Altman was hired Monday by Microsoft, the tech giant that is a major investor in OpenAI; Shear was named interim CEO; and hundreds of employees, including former CEO Murati, threatened to follow Altman to Microsoft. Shear, 40, who will take over OpenAI, is the co-founder of video game live-streaming company Twitch.
Whether Shear can solidify his leadership depends on his next moves. Shear inherits a shaky company that has lost key founders and executives and faces the risk of losing more key employees. He will have to deal with a moribund board that sparked the crisis and is said to have said that the disintegration of OpenAI is good for the company's mission.
While announcing an investigation into the events that led to Altman’s dismissal, Shear must also rebuild a reduced team, maintain the company’s position as a leader in artificial intelligence, and redefine what OpenAI means in the context of a changing industry and a broader global discussion about the risks, benefits and regulation of artificial intelligence.
“When the board informed me of this situation and asked me to take on this role, it was not a decision I made lightly,” Shear wrote in a post on the social platform X. “But ultimately I felt it was my responsibility to help if I could.”
Although best known for founding social media company Twitch, Shear has become a leading commentator on artificial intelligence since its explosion in popularity. A regulatory skeptic, he believes AI will improve so quickly that it could eventually become independent of any outside influence and could easily overwhelm its creators.
Shear's views seem to align with concerns about AI safety, which was reportedly a factor in the OpenAI board's dismissal of Altman. With Altman joining Microsoft, this sets the stage for OpenAI to take a more cautious approach in the post-Altman era. This raises a series of questions, especially how Shear will handle OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft.
As a pioneering technician, Shear is still strong. His first entrepreneurial attempt was the calendar app Kiko, which was incubated in 2005 by Y Combinator, which was full of big names. At the same time, there were also the later popular Reddit and social app Loopt (the latter was the first work of Altman, the current CEO of OpenAI).
Born in Seattle and with a degree in computer science from Yale, this veteran investor still likes to call himself an "old scholar". He has served as a part-time mentor at the famous startup accelerator Y Combinator for many years, witnessing and guiding the rise of countless technology stars. Surprisingly, he also likes to share business intelligence on the social networking site X, which is often hidden between his long articles about his extreme enthusiasm for games and science fiction.
In 2021, in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of his second startup Twitch, Shear compiled 23 tweets, condensing his years of business experience into immortal mottos. For example, "Internet companies, growth is more important than anything else" and "Thousands of ways to survive, only a few choices." In a recent podcast, Shear used his persistence in high-dimensional abstract thinking, coupled with a large number of vivid analogies about chess, interstellar travel, and the origin of mankind, to explain his unique understanding of artificial intelligence and even the ultimate goal - general artificial intelligence.
As a Silicon Valley alumnus, he firmly believes that technology needs appropriate regulation to release dividends without stifling the innovation stage. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, he also believes that it is updating and iterating so fast that it will eventually improve itself and exist independently of human designers. "This level of intelligence power is extremely dangerous, and it can control us in turn." Shear can't help but worry about it.
If AI doesn’t outperform humans, it could still wreak havoc just as humans do. Shear offers this example: “Imagine the 100,000 smartest people you know all thinking 100 times faster and communicating instantly through telepathy and other means,” he said earlier this year. “Those 100,000 people could credibly take over the world. They wouldn’t necessarily be smarter than humans.”
The tone echoes OpenAI’s reasons for firing Altman, and AI safety concerns may have been a factor in OpenAI’s board firing him, though Shear denied on Sunday that Altman’s departure was “due to any specific disagreement over safety.”
It seems that with Altman about to join Microsoft, OpenAI's post-Altman era is doomed to be difficult - especially in terms of maintaining its relationship with Microsoft. After all, the two sides have been tightly bound together before, with OpenAI's engine realizing the upgrade of Bing search, and the latter increasing its investment by tens of billions of dollars.
Whether Shear, a senior technical person, can turn danger into safety and continue OpenAI's brilliant blueprint, we will wait and see!
