AI Alignment

AI alignment is the research field focused on steering AI systems toward outcomes that benefit humans and align with our values. As AI systems become more powerful, ensuring they reliably do what we want them to do — and avoid what we don’t want — becomes increasingly critical.

Key alignment challenges:

• Goal Misspecification: The AI optimizes for the literal stated goal while ignoring the intended goal
• Reward Hacking: The AI finds unintended ways to achieve high rewards
• Value Drift: The system’s behavior changes as it learns and updates
• Out-of-Distribution Behavior: The AI acts unpredictably in novel situations

Techniques like RLHF, Constitutional AI, and debate-based training are current approaches to alignment. Most experts consider alignment one of the most important unsolved problems in AI.