Sam Altman’s Attempt to Return as OpenAI CEO Fails as Board Turns to ex-Twitch CEO
Shear co-founded the live streaming platform Twitch, which was sold to Amazon for nearly $1 billion in 2014. He resigned as CEO in March, ending a 16-year career at Twitch, citing birth of her first child. Shear moved in some of the same Silicon Valley circles as the CEO he is now set to take over. In 2011, Shear and Altman were both named part-time partners for startup incubator Y Combinator, which Altman later led.
Shear describes himself as a techno-optimist, but he has expressed deep fears of sentient and rogue AI. “It’s not a thing to figure out later, it’s a big fucking deal,” he said on the Logan Bartlett podcast in June.
Chase, a longtime Twitch spokesperson now at StreamElements which goes by one name, described Shear as “a good candidate to lead OpenAI given his passion for benefiting the many rather than the few, as he illustrated this with Twitch coupled with his concerns about the potential of AI. to be dangerous. »
Shock departure
The story of Altman’s ouster and rapid return raises questions about OpenAI’s governance and long-term prospects. The structure that allowed a small number of people unrelated to the company to decide Altman’s fate, initially intended to keep OpenAI’s technology beneficial to humanity, has been re-examined. Some investors had previously expressed concerns about the nonprofit board’s lack of experience.
The saga also highlights a schism in the tech industry between those who see generative AI like ChatGPT as a technology to be exploited commercially, and those who worry about the risks of pushing the boundaries of something that has proven to be both powerful and unpredictable.
News of Altman’s departure blind investors who have spent billions of dollars to fund OpenAI’s research. Microsoft, a key partner that pledged $13 billion in funding and provided vast cloud computing resources, led, among other investors, a campaign for Altman’s reinstatement.
Altmann founded OpenAI in 2015 with Brockman, Elon Musk and a small team of top AI researchers. Their goal was to create an open, non-profit AI entity as a counterpoint to profit-driven companies like Google. The organization would work to develop superhuman AI with the goal of benefiting all of humanity rather than a few powerful tech companies and their shareholders.
