Axios C-Suite: The quest to give AI taste

State of play: Taste Labs founder Thais Castello Branco, whose company just exited stealth with $18.5M, is trying to teach AI human taste.

Her bet: Models need guidance from select human "tastemakers" — expert designers and creative specialists who judge AI outputs, explain why something works or doesn't and turn that judgment into signals models can learn from.

• Advice for CEOs: Companies should "pick the few people who are tastemakers internally," make them "the determiners of what is good and great," then "cascade this down through the organization" to set a clear quality standard, Castello Branco tells Axios.

Zoom out: Taste Labs isn't the only startup chasing AI taste. This week, Paul Bakaus launched a16z-backed Renaissance Geek, the company behind Impeccable, an add-on that fuses humans with AI agents to make design decisions.

The bottom line: We're about to find out if taste is so human after all.

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