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Softmax is an AI alignment research startup based in San Francisco, founded in March 2025 by Emmett Shear, Adam Goldstein, and David Bloomin. The company is part research lab and part commercial venture, aimed at developing the science of organic alignment · a framework for understanding how individuals learn to form flourishing wholes at increasing scales.
The founding team brings together complementary backgrounds. Emmett Shear is a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience as founder and CEO of Twitch, a YC partner, and interim CEO of OpenAI, as well as an independent researcher in alignment and agency. Adam Goldstein co-founded the travel site Hipmunk and subsequently spent time as a Visiting Scientist in Michael Levin's lab at Tufts University studying cancer and cell signaling, and as a graduate student at Oxford in Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics. David Bloomin is a software engineer and AI researcher with two decades of experience at Google, Facebook, and Asana, co-founder of the Plurality Institute, and has worked on the MettaGrid project studying emergent social behaviors between AI agents…
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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View on grantmaking.aiCoGames is Softmax’s open-source Python package and live benchmark infrastructure for the Alignment League Benchmark (ALB). It hosts multi-agent social intelligence games like Cogs vs Clips, where teams of agents cooperate to capture and defend territory via specialized roles, and provides tooling to create new games, train reinforcement learning agents, and submit policies to a public leaderboard.