OpenAI's New CEO Posted Edgelord Tweets About Rape and Nazis

"The Nazis were very evil, but..."

Edge Case

OpenAI's latest interim CEO — announced after cofounder Sam Altman was fired and chief technology officer Mira Murati was appointed and then discharged from the role — seems to have made some extremely edgelordy posts.

As British journalist Chris Stokel-Walker pointed out on the platform formerly and perennially known as Twitter, the "OpenAI board appears to have skipped or sped up due diligence" on its newly-announced interim CEO Emmett Shear, a cofounder of Twitch who has an apparent penchant for posting edgelord takes.

On paper, Shear seems very much like the type of AI-anxious leader that the firm would want at its helm during its tumultuous leadership shakeup. He cofounded Twitch in 2008 and sold it to Amazon in 2014, and his belief that AI may destroy humanity could jibe well with the OpenAI board's performatively concerned outlook on the technology that, per insiders, clashed with Altman's AI accelerationism.

When it comes to tweeting, however, Shear's bona fides would make any cautious board nervous — and we're not talking about the distant past, either.

In one August thread, for instance, he veered from mansplaining kink to posting data, for some reason, that "between 40-60% of women seem to have rape/non-consent fantasies" — a provocative topic after a few cocktails with friends, maybe, but almost certainly one about which tech execs should be sounding off on their main accounts.

Poster's Gambit

It gets worse, though.

When someone posted an admittedly dumb theoretical poll about whether one would prefer someone evil taking over the world or having all of humanity destroyed by AI, the Y Combinator alum did what every terminally-online guy does a few minutes into a thought experiment: invoke the Nazis.

"The Nazis were very evil, but I'd rather the actual literal Nazis take over the world forever than flip a coin on the end of all value," Shear tweeted.

To be clear, we don't think the 40-year-old Twitch cofounder believes that women have a deep desire to be raped or that Nazis are good.

Nevertheless, it's a horrible look for someone who's leading the world's preeminent AI firm, even in an interim capacity, to be blasting off these galactic edgelord takes on main (just look at Elon Musk's endless self-inflicted Twitter scandals).

And it also makes us wonder what Shear says and believes in private — and how safe OpenAI will be in his hands.

More on OpenAI: Microsoft Immediately Hires Sam Altman After He's Fired By OpenAI