Softmax is a San Francisco-based research lab and startup founded in March 2025 by Emmett Shear (former Twitch CEO and interim OpenAI CEO), Adam Goldstein, and David Bloomin. The company pursues "organic alignment" — a nature-inspired approach to AI alignment that draws parallels from biological systems such as ant colonies, multicellular organisms, and human teams. Rather than relying on hierarchical control mechanisms, Softmax investigates how AI agents can learn to cooperate and find their role in a greater whole through multi-agent reinforcement learning. Their open-source Cogames benchmark provides tools for creating and training agents in social intelligence games.
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Theory of Change
Softmax believes that the dominant approach to AI alignment — hierarchical control and hard-coded directives — will be insufficient for advanced AI systems. Their theory of change holds that studying the natural principles underlying cooperative intelligence in biological systems (cells, ant colonies, human teams) can yield general alignment mechanisms transferable to AI. By advancing the science of organic alignment through multi-agent reinforcement learning experiments and open-source benchmarks, they aim to discover how AI agents can learn to cooperate with humans and each other intrinsically, rather than through external constraints. If successful, this could provide robust alignment techniques that scale with AI capability without requiring exhaustive human oversight at each step.
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- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 19, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC