Maven is a new social network launched by OpenAI and Twitter alums designed to remove the pressure to amass followers and reinfuse a sense of serendipitous exploration, emphasized in its tagline: “Follow interests, not influencers.” Abandoning what it calls the “popularity-contest style” of most platforms, Maven doesn’t include likes, and lets people follow “interests” instead of other accounts. Its founders built Maven’s algorithm by drawing on the principles of open-ended systems. Its goals include increasing the probability of serendipity while addressing users’ curiosity, thus upping the odds of “meeting people with complementary interests.”

“Maven AI extracts the relevant interests from every post and shows them to you when you see content in your feed,” the company explains at HeyMaven.com. “That way, because posts touch on multiple interests, you continually experience the opportunity to expand your horizons by following new interests.”

Maven was co-founded by erstwhile OpenAI employee Kenneth Stanley and is backed by Ev Williams, who helped launch Twitter and Medium.

“Mental health experts, regulators, and many Internet users themselves have called out the damage that social media can do to mental health,” writes Wired, exploring Maven as “a healthier alternative, inspired by one scientist’s work in artificial intelligence.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also a Maven investor, according to Wired.

“Serendipity is the opposite of finding something through objectives,” Stanley told TechCrunch, which explains that “the idea of seeking novelty for its own sake started as an algorithmic concept that Stanley studies called open-endedness, a subfield of AI research.”

Stanley, a computer science professor at the University of Central Florida, collaborated with his former PhD student, Joel Lehman, on a 2015 book about the convergence of serendipity and open-endedness, “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned.”

The book resulted in “something of an international focal point for the brazen idea that, actually, you can just do things because they’re interesting, rather than because you need to complete some stated objective,” reports TechCrunch.

“‘Open-ended systems are like artificially creative systems,’ said Stanley, noting that humans, evolution and civilization are all also open-ended systems that continue to build on themselves in unexpected ways,” TechCrunch writes.

Stanley teamed with a former grad student, Jimmy Secretan and entrepreneur Blas Moros to found Maven “with Stanley as CEO, Secretan as CTO, and Moros as COO, and formally announced it on Twitter in January,” Wired reports, noting that Maven is “available for Apple and Android devices, and also via the web.”