We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.
News article covering the situation: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires-sam-altman-greg-brockman-employees-openai
Altman’s Microsoft hiring comes just hours after negotiations with OpenAI’s board failed to bring him back as OpenAI CEO. Instead, former Twitch CEO and co-founder Emmett Shear has been named as interim CEO.
Altman had been negotiating to return as OpenAI CEO, but OpenAI’s four-person board refused to step down and let him return.
https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275 The new CEO said it has nothing to do with safety and that he wouldn’t have joined if he hadn’t been able to commercialise the models.
Admittedly he could be lying or the board could have lied to him, but I don’t think we can assume for certain it’s about safety
Sheer also says his first plan is to have a 30 day investigation in to how they reached this point, so maybe what it’s about isn’t even totally clear to those with direct involvement (though it’s still fun to speculate)
Why Emmett? Anyone have insight? I am familiar with him from his time at Twitch. Twitch is a very different company so the selection is a bit surprising. Is OpenAI planning to livestream training runs or something? Hmmm thinking about it some more, a main component of Twitch was chat. Obviously I am reaching.
He’s part of the EA movement. His p(doom) is between 5% and 50% according to Zvi, a prominent member of the larger Rationalist movement. “My AI safety discourse is 100% ‘you are building an alien god that will literally destroy the world when it reaches the critical threshold but be apparently harmless before that.’” Again, according to Zvi.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, read this novel I wrote two days ago or this one that says pretty much the same thing.
His current plans for OpenAI are to make ChatGPT look like a pretty young woman wearing a bikini and sitting in a hot tub as it answers your questions.
I welcome our new AI Thot overlords. Haha DeepThot.