Emmett Shear, the interim CEO of OpenAI, may be out of a job by the end of the hour, day or week given how quickly and unexpectedly things are moving at the world’s hottest AI company. But for now, he’s the person at the helm after a dramatic three-day period in which Sam Altman was fired on Friday with CTO Mira Murati replacing him, much speculation abounded about Altman returning After all, only for Altman and Greg Brockman to officially jump to Microsoft investor and partner in OpenAI, and Murati — late Sunday — to be replaced by Shear.
“Today I received a phone call inviting me to consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to be the interim CEO of
@OpenAI,” he was posted on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) in the early hours of Monday morning.
Shear previously co-founded Justin.tv and was the CEO of its second life as Twitch until March 2023, which seems like a world away from the OpenAI drama. Now, he has a lot of work ahead of him (if he stays in the role).
Fundraising was in the works (we heard the company was trying to raise a lot more money, with names like SoftBank along with financial investors and possibly even more backing from major investor Microsoft, which has already plowed several billion into OpenAI, if terms could be balanced without triggering antitrust investigations). The company is at the center of the debate over the regulation of artificial intelligence. There is more R&D on the roadmap. And of course there are more contracts to sign, ensuring that those who play with GPT commit to becoming its long-term customers.
But first thing’s first, the new CEO starts with a business classic, a three-point plan that can be summed up as what’s the issue? how do you fix it? and how do you create benefit from fixing it? He needs to figure out WTF is going on and make sure he doesn’t send the rest of the company out of control.
In his case, in the next 30 days, he said the company plans to hire an independent investigator — meaning there are still unanswered questions, even within the company, about exactly what happened. The investigator will “investigate the entire process leading up to this point and create a full report.”
Then the plan is to try to measure and also reduce the temperature in the room – which also means that there has indeed been some repulsion and negative reaction not only internally, but externally as well. He will “talk to as many of our employees, partners, investors and customers as possible, take good notes and share key takeaways.”
Last but not least, he’ll be pushing hard to make sure OpenAI doesn’t bleed customers and partners — the core of how it generates revenue — which means that, with AI applications and the use of genetic AI being still very early days, it’s a real concern. In Shear’s words, OpenAI will “transform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force for delivering results for our clients.”
Shear double confirmed other reports over the weekend that whatever issues led to Altman’s ouster, they weren’t security-related, or at least to the extent that they were related to the operation of the business. “I’m not crazy enough to take on this job without the board’s support to commercialize our incredible models,” he said.
Just a few hours
Shear said it took “just a few hours” to decide to take the job when it was offered to him at the weekend. As it happened, it also only took a few hours for people to start picking up on some of his spicier views on technology and life, leading many to wonder if the OpenAI board also took more than a few hours to come up with in his succession plan.
He does not support the Nazis, but he did so uneasily check them out as a better option for other risks and endings when discussing hypothetical end-of-the-world scenarios on Twitter. People have also selected the discussions he had, where he had dealt with some other issues such as consent of women. Regardless of where you stand on his positions (and what his positions are) given OpenAI, AI ethics, and all sorts of controversy surrounding the space… he’s an interesting choice for a successor.
Less controversially, but confusingly, Shear also said that it was “in favor of slowing down“AI development.
It’s unclear how much of an impact Shear will have on the AI development path at the startup he now leads — again, there’s every chance the story could change again given how quickly he’s moved.
But at the very least, his support for moving away from breakneck progress raises questions about how the company’s CEO feels about OpenAI’s current commercial strategy, as laid out just the other week at the company’s first developer event, when it revealed 100 million weekly users of ChatGPT and a number of new ways for third parties to build their own AI applications on the OpenAI platform.
The months he spent under Amazon’s corporate gaze may have had Shear wandering in the badlands of social media, but one thing could have made him attractive to OpenAI’s board, regardless of the fact that, when needed, Shear knows how to play nice with the corporate overlords.
To that end, he notes in his “hello” post that “Our partnership with Microsoft remains strong, and my priority in the coming weeks will be to ensure that we continue to serve all of our customers well.”
Given how many employees are now threatening to move to Microsoft, which owns just under half of OpenAI, it will be interesting to see how this friendly position changes for the company if it truly believes it will remain independent of its strategic backer.
