After hours of negotiations to bring back Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO following his shock firing, the company’s board decided to go a different direction and appoint former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as interim CEO.
According to The Information, Altman won’t return as CEO of OpenAI.
OpenAI co-founder and board director Ilya Sutskever said that Shear will take over as interim CEO.
Shear will replace Mira Murati as CEO, who was publicly aligned with Altman.
Murati’s dismissal comes just hours after she invited Altman to meet with OpenAI executives at the company’s San Francisco headquarters on Sunday.
Shear who is the co-founder of Twitch and Justin.tv, was Twitch’s CEO until March of this year. In 2005, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Yale University.
Shear joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner in June 2011, where he offers advice to the new startups in each batch. He was included on Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list in 2012.
In 2005, Shear, along with Justin Kan, launched Kiko Calendar, an online Ajax-based calendar app. They sold the company on eBay as their venture faced challenges, including competition from Google Calendar.
The hiring of Shear appears to close the door on Altman’s exit after he was fired on Friday when the board said he had not been “consistently candid in his communications.”
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