A new AI alignment player has entered the arena.

Emmett Shear, Adam Goldstein and David Bloomin have set up shop in San Francisco with a 10-person start-up called Softmax. The company is part research lab and part aspiring money maker and aimed at figuring out how to fuse the goals of humans and AIs in a novel way through what the founders describe as “organic alignment.” It’s a heady, philosophical approach to alignment that seeks to take cues from nature and the fundamental traits of intelligent creatures and systems, and we’ll do our best to capture it here.

“We think there are these general principles that govern the alignment of any group of intelligent learning agents or beings, whether it's an ant colony or humans on a team or cells in a body,” Shear said, during his first interview to discuss the new company. “And organic alignment is the kind of alignment where a bunch of peers come together and find their role in a greater whole together where they maintain their individual identity.

“Organic alignment centers on this shared whole idea, which is opposed to the kind of alignment that you see from most foundational model companies that is very much about steering and control and direction. We think of that as hierarchical alignment.” 

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Also, https://softmax.com/about mentions collaboration with Michael Levin, Ken Wilber, Chris Fields, Ken Stanley, Denis Noble, Andrew Briggs, Jeff Clune, Erik Hoel, Ryan Smith, Center for the Study of Apparent Selves, Dalton Sakthivadivel, and Perry Marshall.