Sam Altman, the face of the artificial intelligence revolution, will not return as OpenAI chief executive despite talks to renegotiate his return Sunday, a person familiar with the matter said, the latest twist in one of Silicon Valley’s most dramatic boardroom showdowns.

Emmett Shear, the co-founder of Twitch, a popular video game streaming platform Amazon acquired in 2014, will be named the company’s interim CEO, replacing Mira Murati, who was named interim CEO in a management reshuffle Friday, this person said. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)

The latest development came after a chaotic weekend, where OpenAI investors and employees, blindsided by the board’s move to fire Altman on Friday, mounted a campaign to get him reinstated. In its vague statement explaining the rationale for his ouster, OpenAI had said Altman wasn’t always “candid” in his communications with the board. The news reverberated through Silicon Valley and the halls of government, where Altman had become a major influencer of policy and regulation on AI.

“It is nuts for sure,” the person said, describing the latest developments. “So much value and mission destroyed overnight.”

On Sunday, Altman had gone into the OpenAI office for discussions about his return to the company, posting on X, formerly Twitter, a photo of himself with a visitor badge and writing “first and last time i ever wear one of these.” Altman, the board and investors including Microsoft and venture capital firms discussed bringing him back and replacing the board with new directors, floating names including Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But by late in the evening Sunday night, those talks had broken down and the board announced Shear’s appointment as interim CEO to employees. A spokesperson for OpenAI did not return a request for comment. Shear and Altman did not return requests for comment.

Altman’s ouster highlights a major rift in the artificial intelligence world, where some people believe that the tech should be rushed forward with minimal government regulation, in order to make money and provide helpful tools to people, while others are concerned that AI could soon surpass human intelligence and turn on its creators. OpenAI had initially been founded to provide a counter to Big Tech’s power in AI, but as the company took on more investment money and began developing consumer products, some in the industry said it had abandoned its original mission.

In an interview with tech podcaster Logan Bartlett posted in June, Shear said he was generally an optimist about technology, and that regulators should be careful not to hurt innovation when making tech guardrails. At the same time, he said supersmart AI taking over the world and eradicating human civilization was a real risk. In the podcast, Shear said he believed the chances of such an event happening were between 2 percent and 50 percent.

“It’s like a universe destroying bomb,” Shear said of a hypothetical hyper-intelligent AI that gets out of human control. “It’s bad in a way that makes global warming not a problem.”

Shear stepped down as Twitch’s CEO in February, and was named a part-time adviser to companies at Y Combinator, an influential San Francisco start-up incubator that Altman himself was head of from 2014 to 2019.

In recent days, Altman’s ouster and the boardroom drama at OpenAI has transfixed the tech industry. Under Altman’s leadership, the company transitioned from a nonprofit research lab into a moneymaking corporation that has become one of the most powerful players in artificial intelligence. After it launched its chatbot, ChatGPT about a year ago, it has ignited an AI arms race with Big Tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which is an investor in OpenAI.

Since Altman’s firing, a number of OpenAI executives and employees have either quit or signaled their intention to leave in solidarity. Greg Brockman, one of OpenAI’s founders, quit the company in protest, explaining that he and Altman were shocked at the board’s move. On Saturday, OpenAI executives told workers that they had also been surprised by the news and assured them the ouster had nothing to do with financial or privacy irregularities. By Saturday afternoon, investors and employees who supported Altman launched a campaign to get him reinstated.

Many employees posted their support for Altman on X, formerly known as Twitter. Prominent venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who was an early investor in OpenAI, said he wanted Altman back as CEO but would also “back him in whatever he does next.”

As news of the circumstances around Altman’s ouster began to come out, Silicon Valley circles have turned to anger at OpenAI’s board.

“What happened at OpenAI today is a board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs,” Ron Conway, a longtime venture capitalist said on X. “It is shocking, it is irresponsible, and it does not do right by Sam and Greg [Brockman] or all the builders in OpenAI.”

In an interview with tech podcaster Logan Bartlett posted in June, Shear said he was generally an optimist about technology, and that regulators should be careful not to hurt innovation. At the same time, he said supersmart AI taking over the world and eradicating human civilization was a real risk. In the podcast, Shear said he believed the chances of such an event happening were between 2 percent and 50 percent.