a16z Podcast Emmett Shear on Building AI That Actually Cares: Beyond Control and Steering
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Nov 17, 2025 
Emmett Shear, founder of Twitch and former interim CEO of OpenAI, presents his radical ideas on AI. He critiques the traditional control paradigm for AI alignment, advocating for 'organic alignment'—teaching AI to care and cooperate like humans. Shear discusses the dangers of viewing AI merely as tools, the significance of AIs being able to refuse harmful requests, and his innovative multi-agent simulation approach at Softmax. He outlines a hopeful vision where AIs can be collaborative teammates, emphasizing the need for alignment to ensure a safe future.
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Control Versus Caring
- Treating advanced AIs as tools to be perfectly steered risks creating either uncontrollable power or enslaved beings.
- The only robust positive outcome is an AI that genuinely cares about humans, not just follows orders.
Alignment Is A Continuous Process
- Alignment is not a fixed target you hit once; it's an ongoing, renegotiated process like relationships or families.
- Systems must continuously learn and adapt rather than follow a one-time set of rules.
Whose Goals Count?
- Saying you want an "aligned AI" usually hides whose goals you mean — typically the builders'.
- Organic alignment rejects a single static target and focuses on systems that learn to care.