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Co-founder of Twitch — sold to Amazon for $970 million — Shear became the unlikely pivot point of 2023's most turbulent AI governance crisis, serving as OpenAI's Interim CEO during Sam Altman's brief ouster, then launched Stem AI to work on the alignment problem directly.
Emmett Shear is the Co-Founder of Twitch, the former Interim CEO of OpenAI, and the Co-Founder and CEO of Softmax, an AI alignment research and product company.
Shear co-founded Justin.tv in 2007, which pivoted to become Twitch, the world's leading live-streaming platform for gamers, acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014. He served as Twitch's CEO until 2023. In November 2023, Shear briefly served as Interim CEO of OpenAI during the board's attempted ouster of Sam Altman. He went on to co-found Stem AI and then launched Softmax in 2024 with backing from Andreessen Horowitz, focused on 'organic alignment' between humans and AI through multi-agent machine learning.
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