Win-Win with Liv Boeree

#47 - Emmett Shear - Why NATURE Holds the Answers To AI Alignment

30 snips
Sep 25, 2025
Emmett Shear, co-founder of Twitch and former interim CEO of OpenAI, dives into the future of AI alignment. He argues against traditional control methods and advocates for an 'organic alignment' approach, inspired by nature and collective human behavior. Emmett shares insights on creating altruistic AI through social dynamics and discusses his work with Softmax, experimenting with goal-oriented agents in virtual worlds. He highlights the need for diverse AIs to form human-aligned collectives, emphasizing the importance of nurturing relationships and moral nuance.
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INSIGHT

From Control To Organic Alignment

  • Emmett Shear argues control-based alignment (hard-coding a fixed definition of 'good') will fail because goals and environments are non-stationary.
  • He proposes organic alignment: grow agents into societies that infer and maintain shared goals through interaction.
INSIGHT

Collectives Form Purpose

  • Multicellularity and human teams are examples of alignment emerging from many agents forming a collective 'we'.
  • Emmett says agents always come from other agents and gain purpose by becoming part of larger goal-directed collectives.
ADVICE

Teach Agents A Theory Of Groups

  • Train agents to build self-models and layered theory-of-mind so they can predict how actions change group dynamics over time.
  • Focus on modeling your own learning trajectory, others' trajectories, and the emergent collective to enable robust alignment.
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