Emmett Shear is back with an ant-colony AI startup
Former interim OpenAI CEO Emmett Shear just co-founded Softmax, a 10-person research startup pursuing "organic alignment" inspired by biology and ant colonies. Instead of top-down hierarchical control, the team is running reinforcement learning tests on small agents in virtual worlds to study emergent cooperation. Softmax has raised backing from Andreessen Horowitz and others.