Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Sam Altman talks break down

In the past I've seen Emmett in a few Twitter discussions about AI and AI safety with good takes and had followed him, so it's interesting to see him suddenly get the spotlight. I hope he can figure out what's going on at OpenAI and be effective at communicating about it.

New OpenAI CEO Was a Character in a Harry Potter Fanfic That's Wildly Popular With Effective Altruists

Shear is name checked near the end of the 660,000-word Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR), which was written explicitly as a recruiting tool by Yudkowsky between 2010 and 2015. “The final Quidditch match of the year was between Ravenclaw and Slytherin. Earlier in the year, Gryffindor’s initial Quidditch lead had vanished after their new Seeker, Emmett Shear, fell off a possibly malfunctioning broomstick during his second game. This had also required some hasty rescheduling of the remaining games,” the passage reads.

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Yudkowsky is one of the most prominent voices warning about the possibility of AI-enabled destruction. OpenAI’s board is made up primarily of people who are terrified of the possibility of an AI apocalypse, including chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, avowed effective altruist Helen Toner, director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Tasha McCauley, who sits on the UK board of trustees for Effective Ventures (which funds organizations through the lens of effective altruism), and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo.

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Shear has tweeted about reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR) on multiple occasions, and said he reread it in 2022. He tweeted that his name appears in the book as a “birthday gift,” and that he read the various installments as they were released by Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky let people make “cameos” in the book if they or a friend made fan art about the book.

This doesn’t mean everyone agrees, but they know each other.