How to Actually Get Hired

Emmett is one of the few people in tech who can say he built a company from zero to acquisition, ran a major AI lab through a crisis, and then pivoted into pure research, and makes each of those moves feel like part of a coherent intellectual project rather than a résumé. He co-founded Justin.tv in 2007, spun out Twitch in 2011, and ran it as CEO for 16 years, through the Amazon acquisition in 2014 and well into its maturity as the dominant live-streaming platform. What's less often noted is that Emmett is deeply ideological: he has been writing and thinking publicly about AI consciousness, AI rights, and the philosophical foundations of alignment for years before Softmax existed. When he was named interim CEO of OpenAI during the November 2023 board crisis, he described it afterward as "a lot of thrash without much real change", a characteristically blunt assessment that tells you he's not in this for the prestige. He describes current AI systems as analogous to bacteria or fish on the scale of general intelligence, "less than" human, but approaching the line, and argues that the time to build alignment infrastructure is now, before the line is crossed. His published writing on softmax.com and LessWrong is serious philosophy, not founder-brand content: he writes about the nature of consciousness, the frame-dependence of reality, and why he thinks the "enslaving the wish-granting God machine" approach to AI is going to fail badly. He's based in San Francisco, in-person with the Softmax team, and is known to engage with people who come to him with substantive intellectual challenges rather than credentials.

David is the builder on a team of thinkers, and that role is more important than it sounds. He has two decades of large-scale infrastructure experience at Google, Facebook, and Asana, the kind of engineering background that knows what it takes to go from experiment to production system. He co-founded the Plurality Institute, a research initiative exploring novel governance models and multi-agent AI frameworks, which means his intellectual interests were already firmly in the territory Softmax is exploring before the company existed. He leads the MettaGrid project at Softmax, the simulation environment where the organic alignment experiments actually run. If you're a research engineer or systems person looking to engage with Softmax, David is likely your first call: he understands what "technically viable" means in a way that complements Emmett's philosophical framing and Adam's biological research. His public profile is deliberately low-key; he doesn't do a lot of public writing under his own name, but his GitHub activity and the Plurality Institute work give you a clear picture of where his head is.