So I meant to write something lighter this week, maybe a post about the Black Friday deals that are already clogging my inbox (Anker is doing 40% off charging bricks again, which happens approximately every six weeks now, so I don't know why it still gets called a "deal"). But I keep getting pulled back to the OpenAI mess, and specifically to one detail everybody's already moved past: for somewhere between two and three days last week, the company was run by a guy named Emmett Shear.
Quick recap for anyone who spent the weekend actually enjoying their families instead of refreshing Twitter, sorry, X. Friday the 17th, OpenAI's board fires Sam Altman as CEO, no real explanation given beyond some vague line about him not being "consistently candid." Chaos immediately. Mira Murati gets named interim CEO that same day. Over the weekend the board tries to walk it back and bring Altman back, that falls apart, and by Sunday the 19th they've installed Emmett Shear, former Twitch CEO, as the new interim guy. Then Microsoft announces Monday that it's just hiring Altman and cofounder Greg Brockman outright to run a new research team, over 700 of OpenAI's roughly 770 employees sign a letter threatening to quit unless the board resigns and Altman comes back, and by Tuesday night Altman is back as CEO under a new board (Bret Taylor as chair, Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo as the one holdover from the old one).
Shear's whole tenure fits inside a long weekend. He didn't even get an office, probably, or if he did I doubt he unpacked anything into it. And the thing I keep chewing on isn't the boardroom politics, which honestly nobody outside that room fully understands yet and probably won't for a while. It's that a guy stepped into what might be the single highest-pressure CEO job on the planet right now, with zero transition period, no briefing decks, nothing, and then three days later stepped back out having accomplished basically nothing except a couple of tweets about wanting to look into what actually happened before taking sides. That's not a knock on him. I think that was the correct call! But it's a strange kind of career footnote, being CEO of the company everyone's terrified/excited about for less time than it takes to watch the extended cut of a Peter Jackson movie.
I also can't stop thinking about Ilya Sutskever's public about-face, the guy who was on the board that fired Altman, posting that he deeply regretted participating in the board's actions. You don't see that kind of reversal from a company insider very often, and definitely not one who helped start the company. Whatever the internal reasoning was, it clearly wasn't holding up under 72 hours of actual scrutiny and 700 signatures.
Anyway. This blog turned twelve this month, which is a genuinely strange thing to sit with in between all this. Twelve years of me typing into a text box about whatever gadget or website was breaking my brain that week, and here I am doing the exact same thing about an AI company's HR drama instead of, say, the new iPhone camera or whatever I'd have been writing about back in 2011. The subject matter changes, the format doesn't.
I don't have a tidy theory about what this means for OpenAI going forward, or for AI safety, or for whether nonprofit boards should be running companies attached to tens of billions of dollars in Microsoft money (my gut says no, obviously not, but that's a post for another day). What I do have is a low-grade fascination with how fast the org chart of one of the most consequential companies alive right now got rearranged, twice, over a single weekend, by people mostly communicating through screenshots of Slack messages and cryptic tweets. If you'd told me in 2011, when I started this thing on a free WordPress theme, that "corporate governance drama" would ever be a genre of tech news people stayed up until 2am refreshing, I'd have laughed at you.
Going to go actually buy that charging brick now. Happy almost-Thanksgiving to the two or three of you who still read this on a Saturday.