A replacement for Sam Altman, the abruptly fired former CEO of OpenAI, has already been announced, just a few days after his shocking departure.
Following several days of conjecture and conjecture, Emmett Shear, the ex-co-founder and CEO of Twitch, has announced that he will be taking the helm of what is likely to be the most prominent artificial intelligence startup globally.
Shear said he received a call from the corporation asking him to take over as interim CEO in an early Monday post on X, and he had accepted “after consulting with my family and pondering on it for just a few hours”.
It happens after Altman, who oversaw OpenAI’s creation of the enormously successful generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, departed following pressure to resign from the board.
It’s unknown why he left, but several insiders had voiced concerns that Altman wasn’t the perfect match for the business. Concerns were raised about the possibility that his involvement in Worldcoin, an eye-scanning tech business, acted as a distraction.
Emmett Shear: who is he?
Though most people are unaware of him, Shear is a well-known figure in Silicon Valley.
Shear made Twitch, the live-streaming platform he co-founded in 2007 with Justin Kan, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt, into a global sensation by taking it from its humble beginnings as a 24/7 broadcast of Kan’s life.
Shear resigned as Twitch’s CEO last year, and Twitch was purchased by Amazon for $1 billion in 2014.
Streamers who felt the platform wasn’t standing up for their rights caused him conflict while he was employed there. It was embroiled in a heated talent war with rival YouTube, which was luring a number of well-known Twitch celebrities with big-time exclusive broadcasting arrangements.
Following his exit from the streaming platform, Shear joined the startup accelerator Y Combinator as a partner. Altman served as Y Combinator’s president before.
Source (CNBC)
