Wes Chow and Emmett Shear: Are We Enslaving the Wish-Granting God Machine? скачать в хорошем качестве

Wes Chow and Emmett Shear: Are We Enslaving the Wish-Granting God Machine?

“We're sort of at this point where we seem quite happy enslaving the wish-granting God machine. In fact, that's the current plan of record. That's a bad plan, and it's not going to work.” — Emmett Shear In this salon, our host Wes Chow had an amazing conversation with Emmett Shear, interim CEO of OpenAI and founder of Softmax—a company rethinking human–AI alignment.The discussion centered on a provocative question: what if we are solving AI alignment completely backwards? While much of the industry has treated AI as a tool to be optimized and controlled, Softmax approaches the problem differently. Drawing on ant colonies, cellular intelligence, and the work of Michael Levin on collective behavior, Shear outlined an idea he calls “organic alignment”—an approach inspired by the ways evolution has addressed coordination and cooperation over billions of years. Topics explored in the salon included: The Softmax vision: What it could mean to create AI systems that maintain individual identity while contributing to a shared purpose, and why biology may offer more useful models than optimization theory alone. The mechanism: How Softmax’s approach differs from RLHF and constitutional AI, and what organic alignment might look like in practice—through ideas such as multi-agent reinforcement learning, shared attractor basins, and immune-system–like structures for AI communities. Human–human implications: What building systems where agents align as peers might reveal about how humans succeed—or fail—at aligning with one another. AI rights: Why Shear argued that groundwork for AI rights needs to be established before key thresholds are crossed, how AI rights differ from animal rights, and why entities unconstrained by biology may require an entirely new theory of rights. Beyond 501(c)(3)s: Whether pursuing transformative AI research may require inventing new organizational structures beyond existing nonprofit and corporate models. Throughout the conversation, Shear challenged the prevailing assumption that increasingly capable AI systems must remain firmly subservient. He argued that attempts to permanently control such systems are not only morally questionable, but also practically unsustainable. About Emmett Shear: Emmett Shear co-founded Justin.tv in 2007, which later evolved into Twitch and was acquired by Amazon for nearly $1 billion in 2014. He served as Twitch’s CEO until 2023, became a Y Combinator partner, and briefly served as interim CEO of OpenAI during a pivotal moment in the organization’s history. He is now building Softmax, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Lionheart Ventures, and Plural, with the goal of charting a third path between pure research and pure profit—one in which aligning superintelligent systems does not require enslaving them. ***** Remember to visit our website to explore everything we offer: •Attend public salons on history, science, literature, and more on interintellect.com •Attend for free and get access to offline events too and our online forum: interintellect.com/community •Start hosting your own Interintellect events: interintellect.com/hosting