Twitch CEO wants all ages on the platform

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“When I explain it, I say we have all experienced being tired at the end of the day and coming home and just wanting to turn on the TV and relax,” he said. “You don’t always want to turn on like a new episode of Game of Thrones, right? Because that’s an emotional commitment. And you can’t get distracted in the middle.

“Twitch is the place you can go where you have something that’s entertaining, you can get distracted whenever you want and look at your phone, because there’s no narrative plot that you are going to miss. But any time you want to lean in, you can lean in and pay attention.”

Clancy remains close to former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, who was tapped to serve as interim CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI when its board dismissed Sam Altman last month.

The interview with Clancy was conducted before Altman returned to the CEO position, after most of OpenAI’s staff threatened to leave en masse if Altman wasn’t reinstated.

“I offered my condolences,” Clancy said. “He didn’t say much back, he said it surprised him too.”

Clancy holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Texas at Austin.

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“I think what they are doing is silly,” he said of the OpenAI board. “I think the outcome is pretty clear, because the board has no negotiating power. Their only option is OpenAI is worthless and becomes this small elitist thing for people that want to do research on AI safety, and not actually be at the cutting edge of AI, because in the end they will have nobody working there.”

The lesson from the OpenAI drama, if there is one, is that doomsayers are approaching the AI issue from a fundamentally flawed position, according to Clancy.

“In every innovation, bad things have happened, and the biggest one is the industrial revolution and the internal combustion engine,” he said. “That in fact has led to climate change and, in fact, may lead to the extinction of our species.

“But the flaw in the argument is this idea that anyone could predict the bad thing that’s going to happen, and then also get an agreement on an intervention on how to stop the bad thing from happening. We can come up with a solution for climate change now but imagine them trying to come up with that in the 1920s.

“I think people who think that are just wrong.”

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