tl;dr: software engineer (full-time in SF $230k-280k + equity or remote contractor $60-80/hour)

Remember the three-day CEO of OpenAI? We're inviting you to join him in building a video game. AI agents play it, and it's actually a benchmark for cooperativeness. It also solves alignment, but the company isn't AI safety. We hope you're a little intrigued 🎮

So: in 2023, Ilya Sutskever and the OpenAI board fired Sam Altman. Emmett Shear, former CEO of Twitch, was brought in to replace him. He agreed but demanded an independent investigation and proof against Altman. But over the next three days, 95% of employees signed an open letter in support of Altman and threatened to leave if he wasn't reinstated. The board surrendered, Sam returned, everyone pretended nothing happened — and the meme 'What did Ilya see?' was born on Twitter, along with rumors of a secret Q* project and a breakthrough to AGI 🍓

We still don't know what Ilya saw. But Emmett saw a lack of a real plan at the world's #1 AI lab, got very upset, and together with Adam Goldstein (founder of Hipmunk) and David Blumin (advisor to Zuckerberg at Facebook), founded Softmax 💙

Softmax believes that trying to control models, as is usually done in safety, is a doomed endeavor. Instead, they want to teach models to cooperate in a broad sense: with each other and with humans — and they call this organic alignment 🍀

Right now, the team is building a 5v5 benchmark game in the spirit of Dota/LoL. Researchers submit their agents, and the benchmark evaluates how well they can cooperate and not hog all the resources. Behind Softmax, besides an amazing team, there's already a round from Andreessen Horowitz and Lionheart 🎮

There are two ways to join them — you can join the office in the USA, or remotely as a contractor📎

For the office position, you'll need to either already be in the USA or at least have a visa to come for a work trial. The bar is a bit higher there, but so is the compensation range, of course. Plus, there's equity.

And if you're not yet ready to commit to relocating and coming to the office every day, or if you prefer calmly closing issues rather than worrying about the big picture of organic alignment — you can become a contractor.

Requirements: 🎯 strong engineering background; 🎯 Python and/or C++; 🎯 good written English; ➕ experience with distributed systems, ML/DS, or visualization tools is a plus.

For SF, the range is $230k-280k + equity. For contractors — $60-80/hour. It's possible to transition to a full-time employee if it works out for both sides 🏠

Write to Fedor @owlkov ❤️