Update: He's already out, lmao.
Original article: Emmett Shear, former CEO of Twitch for over a decade, is now the interim CEO of OpenAI, the embattled tech company that abruptly jettisoned its own CEO, Sam Altman, over the weekend. Possibly the very interim CEO, at the rate things seem to be going. This has resulted in a deluge of mainstream interest in a man who previously wasn’t all that well known, even to gamers.
The past couple days have seen numerous publications leap to chronicle every detail they could glean from Shear’s social media history. But what can his old tweets tell us about how he’ll steer the company behind ChatGPT, a vastly different venture than Twitch? Probably not much! This year alone, Shear has tweeted about sex stuff, gender politics, that one stupid pickup artist book that popularized “negging,” and how “most” CEO and executive jobs are “very automatable” (he’s at least right about that one). They’re the tweets of an archetypal tech guy, the exact kind of guy who often gets these kinds of jobs for better and, more often, worse.
Bloomberg’s Cecilia D’Anastasio – a former Kotaku colleague of everybody at Aftermath – spoke to former Twitch employees and chronicled the platform’s rocky history of issues like sexism, extremism, and child predation. These issues are relevant to the task at hand for Shear, given that he’ll have to grapple with thorny ethical concerns while running an AI company. His track record on this front is not exactly spotless: a 2020 report alleged systemic sexism, racism, and abuse within Twitch’s halls just as the platform was facing a reckoning over similar issues among creators. On a similar note, over the course of years of talking to people who’ve worked at Twitch, I’ve heard repeated stories of Shear’s proclivity for thought exercises that pushed the boundaries of taste, like entertaining questions about whether KKK members should be allowed to stream on Twitch during an all-hands meeting.
By and large, though, even those who are in the know have reiterated the same basic points: 1) Shear, whose first job aboard the S.S. OpenAI will be to quell a mutiny of hundreds of staffers who are threatening to quit over Altman’s firing – a large-scale communication issue – is not a great communicator, and 2) it’s too soon to say what’s going to happen.
"The letter from the [OpenAI] employees, that seems like the worst case scenario for Emmett as CEO given where his strengths are,” Marcus “DJWheat” Graham, a former longtime Twitch employee who focused on community, told Aftermath. “Emmett is really phenomenally exceptional at operational scale of technology. That was his superpower that he deployed in the early days of Twitch – and did so to a level that Amazon recognized and acquired Twitch for that technology. When you think about AI and some of their challenges for the future, I would think that [for] technology scale, Emmett would be a great choice."
Graham also noted that Shear isn’t totally out of his depth when it comes to AI, as Twitch has come to rely more and more on AI and machine learning to handle platform-wide moderation and content removal over the years. But, on the flipside, Shear is, in Graham’s eyes, not exactly a people person, which ultimately put Twitch at odds with its own community.
“At Twitch,” Graham said, “Emmett relied on other people to fill some of the areas where he was weaker when it came to people and relationships, which has been an important pain point for the community for a long time. … It's strange because I feel like there's still so much detail we have zero idea about [when it comes to OpenAI], and it seems like the story is still writing itself."
Other former Twitch employees who worked with Shear concur with Graham.
“It was really common to hear he should’ve stepped away from being Twitch’s CEO a lot earlier – and maybe even to a CTO role,” Zachary Diaz, former director of emerging content at Twitch and current chief strategy officer at content creator organization OTK, told Aftermath. “Because he was just consistently out of step with what the community wanted/needed. He couldn’t mesh with it. Does OpenAI need that? Probably not. Maybe he’ll do great. Sucks to wake up the next day and have 700 of your new employees saying they’ll quit if you don’t get replaced, though.”
“Emmett was a great CEO at Twitch for the first few years, but I would argue things flipped once we grew past our initial phases,” said Ben Goldhaber, former director of content marketing at Twitch. “So no, I don't think he has the level of experience or background to give me confidence that he can run an $80-billion company.”
Shear has expressed caution around AI’s destructive potential, which maybe influenced OpenAI’s decision to hire him, but also he’s super stoked about “commercializing our awesome models.” Ultimately, we find ourselves back where we started: Shear, a consummate Tech Guy, is taking over a zeitgeist-y tech company at least for the time being, and nobody knows how it’s going to play out.
But we all want to know how it’s going to play out; after all, AI has been touted by people like Sam Altman as our inevitable future, so it’s natural to want to know how Shear will factor into that. We’ve been told repeatedly that AI will be everywhere, do everything, and potentially take our jobs despite its demonstrable inability to perform many basic tasks well, or even decently – and despite what seems to be a faltering appetite for what it can produce once the novelty wears off.
Moreover, we’ve seen our tech overlords get it wrong numerous times, only to suffer little in the way of meaningful long-term consequences. Think Zuckerberg and the metaverse, whose adherents have swung, monkey bar-like, over to the AI fad without missing a rung. Even to people who haven’t followed the saga closely, that does not seem right or fair. When Altman was ousted, these collective energies resulted in a feeding frenzy among everyone – especially reporters, myself included – to swoop in and sweep up crumbs of detail about OpenAI and Shear that feel important, to produce something prescient to satisfy both our own curiosity and the algorithmic hellscape the aforementioned tech overlords have trapped us in. Maybe, armed with knowledge, we can finally exert some degree of agency over all this. Also: drama. We all love drama.
While I think it’s important for the public to have relevant information about a suddenly very powerful person, it’s hard to point to any immediately useful purpose talk of tweets and gossip serves. Perhaps down the line we’ll be able to look back at Shear’s tenure – whether it lasts a couple years or a couple days – and say, “Ah, it was clear that things would play out this way all along!” But otherwise he’s already got the job, and if he loses it (or quits), it’ll be as much because employees and the folks clutching the purse strings got mad that he isn’t Sam Altman as who he is. Maybe sating curiosity – and in so doing, creating the illusion that we have any sort of agency over the unelected titans of industry who rule our lives – is an end unto itself. Or maybe we’re all just feeding the machine those tech guys built, which no longer serves anybody, not even them.
