You Learn a Lot at Recess. So Can AI: Softmax’s Emmett Shear in Conversation

AI agents won’t learn how to cooperate, build trust, or navigate conflicting goals if they never experience real social consequences. Softmax founder and CEO Emmett Shear is building multiplayer virtual worlds where AI agents can compete, cooperate, make mistakes, and learn from other agents with genuinely different goals. In this interview from O’Reilly Foo Camp, he explains why he sees social experience as a missing piece of AI alignment and why training an agent to behave cooperatively isn’t the same as teaching it to cooperate. Shear also suggests reframing the way we think about AI models: on the one hand, as children we’re collectively raising, and on the other, as a new artistic medium that could produce generative books, films, characters, and experiences. Follow O'Reilly on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oreilly/ Facebook: http://facebook.com/OReilly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oreillymedia BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/oreilly.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@oreillymedia