After a week-end that seemed like an episode of a soap opera, say, Hex and the City or Desperate Programmers, OpenAI have announced that Emmett Shear, former CEO of Twitch, a video streaming service acquired by Amazon in 2014, has become, depending upon which report you read, either interim CEO or permanent CEO. In a Bloomberg report, published at 11:57 UTC on 2023-11-20, they’re going with permanent. Here’s the report, courtesy of Yahoo! to evade the paywall.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-taps-ex-twitch-ceo-091629685.html
Instead, OpenAI’s board replaced Altman with Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, in a stinging rebuke to its investors. Nadella then announced that he had recruited Altman and Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder who had quit in protest, to lead a newly formed in-house AI research unit at Microsoft, casting a shadow over the future of its prized investment.
Now OpenAI, which was in talks with investors about a $86 billion valuation, risks an exodus of employees to Microsoft and other rivals, and an end to its stunning growth. And the startup will face close scrutiny over its ability, or willingness, to turn its cutting-edge AI into profits.
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Altman’s replacement, Shear, stepped down as CEO of Amazon.com Inc.’s game-streaming site Twitch earlier this year. He won over directors at OpenAI because of his past recognition of the existential threats that AI presented, a person familiar with the matter said.
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The fallout from the board’s decision to defy investors is likely to be widespread. Thrive Capital had been expected to lead an offer for employee shares, a deal that would value OpenAI at $86 billion. As of this weekend, the firm had not yet wired the money and it told OpenAI that Altman’s departure will affect its actions.
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Like some members of OpenAI’s board, Shear has ties to the sometimes controversial effective altruism movement, which sees serious risks from advanced AI. Many effective altruists — a pseudo-philosophical movement that seeks to donate money to head off existential risks — have imagined scenarios in which a powerful AI system could wreak widespread harm.
Ahh, here comes “Effective Altruism” (EA) again. They appear to have won this clash of EA versus e/acc.
This Emmett Shear appears to be a piece of work. Here are are some random snippets collected by people across 𝕏.
“[A]ctual, literal Nazis take over…”.
This is a 23 minute interview with Shear from June, 2023 on his reaction to Artificial Intelligence doom theories.
Microsoft CEO Satya (“Blue Screen of Apu”) Nadella says all is well between Microsoft and OpenAI.
Oh, and we’re hiring Sam Altman, fired OpenAI CEO, and Greg Brockman, deposed OpenAI board chairman who quit later that day, to “lead a new advanced AI research team.”.
On 2023-11-18, SEMAFOR, founded by Ben Smith, former editor of BuzzFeed News, and whose original funding came in large part from Sam Bankman-Fried, reported:
So, if this is to be believed, a large part of Microsoft’s US$10 billion “investment” in OpenAI was not cash but actually credits for use of computing services on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, presumably for training OpenAI models and running their services. This is, presumably, a spigot which can be turned off as easily as turned on.
Given that the popular culture nightmare scenario of an AI apocalypse is the “paperclip maximiser”, does anybody else see the exquisite irony of the two people most seen as promoting the emergence of superhuman AI just went to work for the company whose first foray into mass-market “artificial intelligence” was Clippy?
Will there be a mass migration of talented developers from OpenAI to the new venture at Microsoft to escape their new EA overlords and the dead hand of declerationism? Well, they can’t be too happy with what happened to their financial prospects since last Friday morning.
