Emmett Shear: Goal-based alignment covers only a tiny fraction of human experience
Emmett Shear · Emmett Shear on Building AI That Actually Cares: Beyond Control and Steering · Nov 17, 2025 · at 21:50
Emmett Shear, CEO of Softmax and former interim OpenAI CEO, discusses the limitations of traditional goal-oriented AI alignment on The a16z Podcast.
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“Goals are one level of alignment. You can align something around goals. The kind of goals we're talking about here are one level of alignment. You can align something around goals by like if you can explicitly articulate in concept and in description, the states of the world that you wish to attain, you can orient around goals, but that only, that's a tiny percentage of human experience can be done that way.”
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