OpenAI's CEO musical chairs
Emmett Shear's short-lived stint. And PC Gamer's history issue causes Twitter fury over sexism, but did critics get it right?
In this week’s episode our valiant hosts prepare for the week's food based festivities.
Life comes at you fast.
We recorded the episode on Tuesday, November 21, and focused our opening new segment on Twitch founder Emmett Shear's appointment as the new interim CEO of OpenAI. However, within 12 hours of recording, Shear was replaced with OpenAI's original CEO, Sam Altman. But while our news may be out of date, our conversation still offers hot take commentary about Shear's legacy at Twitch, and the challenge of executive-level pivoting from deep inside the game industry to the tech industry more broadly. Ironically, we did make the prediction that Shear would not outlast the year as CEO--so were going to take this as a win.
Then we pull apart all the messy tendrils that followed PC Gamer's recent 30 year retrospective issue, which was widely accused on Twitter and LinkedIn for providing a sexist representation of the PC industry's history. And while it's technically true, it's not true for the reasons everyone seems to think it is. Laine and Joost walk-through how a couple of tweets snowballed into a full-blown misinformation event, and Laine breaks down what's at stake in popular understandings of history in a case like the PC Gamer anniversary issue.
Other fun surprises include a surprisingly long discussion about lighthouses, and Joost's unbeknownst (to Laine) Dune fandom.
Listen in!